
Class _!___ 



Book 



u 



CorpgM .. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 
ROBERT LAW, D.D. 



THE HOPE OF 
OUR CALLING 



BY 

ROBERT LAW, D.D. 

KNOX COLLEGE, TORONTO 

AUTHOR OF "THE GEAND ADVENTURE," "THE TESTS OF LIFE,' 

"THE EMOTIONS OF JESUS," ETC. ETC. 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



A* 



Copyright, 1918, 
By George H. Doran Company 



30 1918 



Printed in the United States of America 
(6)CI.A506740 



i / 



» 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I The Hope of Our Calling 9 

II The Hereafter in the Old Testament . 29 

III Death, Blessing or Curse? .... 41 

IV The Resurrection of Christ .... 57 
V The Spiritual Body 73 

VI Judgment to Come 89 

VII The Heavenly World 107 

VIII The Heavenly Life 123 

IX The Heavenly Society 139 

X Is Evil Eternal? 155 

XI Eternal Life 173 



I: THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 



I 

The Hope of Our Calling 

"Ye are called in one hope of your calling." — Ephesians iv:4. 

Some time ago, in the days before the war, a 
German theologian prophesied that the hope of im- 
mortality would count for less and less in our reli- 
gion, and would ultimately disappear. And it must 
be admitted that this forecast seemed to be in ac- 
cord with the general trend of thought and interest. 
It is true that no ground of reason on which men 
have been wont to base this hope has been rendered 
untenable, and that no new fact has been discovered 
that discredits it ; the contrary, as will presently be 
shown, is the case. It is true also, that the results 
of the most recent scholarly study of the Scrip- 
tures point entirely in the opposite direction. Es- 
pecially is it the case that a more searching and 
realistic investigation of the Gospels than they had 
been before subjected to, shows that the eschato- 
logical element in the Life and Teaching of Jesus 
is not anything secondary, but is fundamental and 
pervasive to an extent which had not been appre- 
hended. So much so, that a veteran and prince 
among New Testament scholars, Dr. Sanday, is 

9 



10 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

found acknowledging that he had not " until lately 
adequately realized how far the centre of gravity 
of our Lord's ministry and mission lay beyond the 
grave.' ' Whether the results of this closer his- 
torical interpretation will in course of time filter 
down into popular thought, and if they do, in what 
form and with what effect, remains a question. 
Meantime it is beyond question that for at least a 
generation the hope of immortality has been count- 
ing for less and less in our religious life. The 
majority of people, no doubt, retain the traditional 
belief in a future state of existence; but it does 
not grip, it scarcely interests them; at most it 
ministers a vague consolation in time of bereave- 
ment. And the same thing has come to be true of 
those for whom religion is more vital, and of the 
Church as a whole. Before the outbreak of the 
war sermons whose keynote was the life everlast- 
ing were comparatively seldom heard from our 
pulpits, and there was no more neglected section of 
the hymn book than that on the Last Things. 

Nor is it difficult to account for this. A pro- 
longed period of peace and prosperity, when prog- 
ress in every department of activity seems to be 
constant and almost automatic, and the near hori- 
zon is bright with dazzling possibilities, is not one 
in which the vision of eternity is apt to grow most 
vivid. "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for 
many years" tends to become the utterance, not 
of a besotted individual, but of the collective mind. 
Another and more creditable cause is the new em- 



THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 11 

phasis which in this generation is laid upon the 
social aspects and applications of Christianity. 
Human progress never succeeds in keeping to the 
via media; its advance is always by zigzags. We 
seem incapable of doing justice to one interest 
without doing injustice to another. So it is now. 
There was a time when the conception of the 
Christian salvation was far too exclusively that 
of dying in the peace of believing and going to 
Heaven. But we have changed all that. Social 
reform rather than the "salvation of souls' ' is 
our watchword; and the most earnest religion 
we have is more intent on getting things put right 
here and now than on any future Kingdom of 
Heaven. And how much, how very much, there 
is that is wholesome, how much to be thankful 
for, in this reaction from an excessive individual- 
ism and other-worldliness ! 

Yet, if we will listen to the teaching of history 
we shall be aware of the peril that attends all 
such reactions. We shall learn that in the Body 
of Truth no member can suffer neglect without 
injury to the rest; we shall take warning that we 
can never remedy one defect by creating another. 
And the question this sermon is intended in the 
first place to raise is, whether apart from the con- 
viction of personal immortality — if we believe 
that this present state of existence contains all 
there is, not only for ourselves hut for all men — 
it is possible to possess any ideal for the indi- 



12 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

vidual life, or any hope for human society, that 
can be called stimulating and satisfying. 

We ungrudgingly admit — or, rather, gladly as- 
sert — that there are men who with no hope beyond 
the grave live noble, self-denying lives, who show 
an enthusiastic interest in all that concerns the wel- 
fare of their fellow-men, who are willing to spend 
and be spent, to labor and suffer, and even die, (as 
many have done in the present war) merely that 
those who come after them may find the world 
a better place. Nor is it to be thought that any of 
us must live ignobly, although we believed that 
life would end next week. Eight is always right, 
and wrong unalterably wrong; and in that faith, 
even if all things human end in death, we should 
have to live as best we might. But that "best" 
would not be well. For we are saved by hope. 
We are so made that we cannot act in the present 
and for the present only. To say that we are ra- 
tional beings means that we act with an outlook 
upon some future near or far. We sow in hope 
that we shall reap, or that others will reap. The 
permanence of any fact, either in itself or in its 
consequences, is an essential factor of value ; and 
while moral ideals have an absolute value — the 
value of right depending on nothing else than its 
rightness — yet an ideal to be a fact at all, must 
have being. And the ideal has being only in 
minds ; and if all the minds whose ideal it is cease 
to exist, not only its existence but every trace 
and memory of its existence must be obliterated. 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 13 

We may say that to do right is at any rate eter- 
nally right ; that, whatever happens, it will always 
be a fact that we made the right choice, and that 
this fact will enter somehow as a component into 
the general sum of human things ; but if that gen- 
eral sum is finally nothing, what value remains to 
its components! We may say that the past is 
never dead but lives still in the present and will 
live on in the future; but if a time shall come 
when for humanity there is no present and no 
future, but only a past that is absolutely gone, 
which there is nothing to recall and no one to re- 
member, can it be said that anything done in it 
is a fact of imperishable value! It must be ad- 
mitted at any rate that it makes practically a 
vast difference whether one is convinced that the 
right choice he makes, it may be in the face of 
sore temptation, is destined to bear permanent 
fruit in his own and in other lives, or that all 
fidelity, all striving after purity and goodness, 
will in the end leave no trace anywhere. The 
truth is that we are saved by hope ; that all men 
who live nobly and fight the good fight do so 
because they believe that their action will bear 
fruit in some future far or near. They have 
thought out matters so far, and it is only so long 
as we do not think them out to the end that we 
can ignore the hope of personal immortality. 

For what is the substitute which a popular 
school of modern thought offers for this? It is 
the contribution each of us can make to the future 



14 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

progress of the race, that we may live on in other 
lives made better by the fact that we have lived. 
If we must feed our minds on a future, it is far 
better to set our hearts on doing what we can in 
our brief day to make life better for those who are 
to come after us, than to hanker after the continu- 
ance of our own petty personal existence. We 
ought to remember, as it is often said, that though 
God buries the workman, He carries on the work, 
and that it is the work, not the tools, that is the 
important thing. But this is merely to evade the 
ultimate issue. One would like to know how God 
is going to carry on the work when He has buried 
all the workmen; and, moreover, what the "work" 
is He is going to carry on (believing with St. Paul 
that "we are His workmanship"). Those who 
rest in this position assume the immortality of 
man, though not of men. They contemplate the 
permanence of the human race. But how, one 
would again like to know, without individual im- 
mortality can there be an immortality of the race! 
Modern science dispels any such dream. "Till a 
period within the memory of men now living it 
was possible to credit terrestrial life with an in- 
finite future, wherein there was room for an in- 
finite approach to an unpictured perfection. It 
could always be hoped that human efforts would 
leave behind them some enduring traces which, 
however slowly, might accumulate without end. 
But hopes like these are possible no more. All 
terrestrial life is in revolt against the second law 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 15 

of thermodynamics (the degradation of energy) ; 
but, to it, in the end, must all terrestrial life suc- 
cumb.' J (A. J. Balfour, Theism and Humanism, 
pp. 90-92.) If the physical history of this planet 
is allowed to run out its natural course, there will 
one day be a last man ; and if there is no life be- 
yond, with his expiring breath humanity will be 
extinct ; all its history of mingled good and evil, 
its sins and heroisms, its aspirations and strug- 
gles, will have gone down into the grave of ever- 
lasting nonentity. It seems a fine thing to say: 
What matters if I pass? let me think of others. 
But these other lives have become petty and insig- 
nificant as your own. Try as you will to obtain 
firm footing, all is sinking sand. Human griefs 
and human happiness, human right and human 
wrong, all are ephemeral as the itching of your 
eyebrow. There is no escape from the ultimate 
issue. If the life of the individual is only "a mo- 
mentary taste of being, from the well amid the 
waste/ ' then all human history is but the "phan- 
tom caravan" which at last reaches "the nothing 
it set out from. ' ' In Plato 's phrase, all things are 
spent on death. Could any creed be more paralyz- 
ing, if its implications were realized! It is be- 
cause they do not think matters out to the end that 
those who deny the hope of immortality can en- 
dure the denial.* 

* There are exceptions to this statement, but they are of such a 
kind as only to emphasize its general truth. One who has honestly 
faced the final issue writes: "Only on the firm foundation of un- 



16 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

But the tragic events of the times in which we 
live are compelling us so to think, and to-day the 
Hope of the Gospel is nearer and dearer to mul- 
titudes than ever before. Not that the war with 
its colossal sacrifice of human personality in any 
way strengthens the case for immortality; but it 
brings the alternative home to us with a poignant 
intensity. When men, obeying the call of duty, 
are cut down in thick swathes long ere the scythe 
of time had any claim upon them, their powers 
still in the green blade, their dreams and ambitions 
unrealized, their work apparently undone, if this 
were the end, then what is man? His beauty is 
consumed like the moth; his days are like unto 
vanity. We feel the tragic incompleteness of 
these young lives; and then we feel the incom- 
pleteness of all human life, feel that it cannot be 
a circle closing us in, it must be a path leading 
elsewhere. It is so manifestly a fragment, a be- 
ginning, a sowing-time of which the full harvest 

must be hereafter. 

# # # 

To reach an assurance so greatly to be desired 
men have followed various paths. There is the 
path of spiritualism, of actual communications 
from the departed, demonstrating to the senses 
the fact of their survival beyond death. But 
without affirming or denying or committing my- 
self to any opinion about the reality of such mani- 

yielding despair can the soul's habitation hereafter be built/' 
(Hon. Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays, p. 60.) 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 17 

festations, I may express the conviction that, 
while they may in certain cases confirm belief in 
personal immortality, they can never originate it. 
It is safe to assert that no one has ever come 
really to believe in a future life because he has 
seen a ghost or heard mysterious table-rappings. 
It is the belief that makes these communications 
from the unseen credible, if they are credible, not 
vice versa. 

There is the path of philosophical speculation, 
the path of Plato and his successors, who have 
reasoned, and perhaps reasoned well, that the 
soul is by its very nature indestructible. But the 
metaphysical proof will never lead, will never at 
any rate lead the ordinary man, very far. 

We get further, perhaps, by the path of simple 
instinct. There is something in most of us that 
naturally revolts against the "cold obstruction 
of the tomb." Even a seasoned agnostic like 
Huxley acknowledges "I do not relish the thought 
that in 1900 I shall have ceased to be, as com- 
pletely as in 1800 I had not begun to be." But 
the instinct is not universal ; and in many of those 
who do possess it, its potency is strangely vari- 
able. Nor does it always point forward to a per- 
sonal immortality; with a large section of the 
human race it takes the form of a longing for ab- 
sorption, the merging of all self -identity, in the 
unconscious depths of Eternal Being. But grant- 
ing the existence and power of the instinct, the 
question arises whether it is to be trusted; and 



18 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

that is part of a larger question. Is life on a 
rational basis? Does the Power that has made 
ns what we are, whatever that Power is, mean 
something by it, and is it to be trusted to finish 
what it has begun? Is there in human life and 
history a purpose that is marching on, and is that 
purpose wise and righteous and good? Can we 
be assured that whatever would be most blessed 
and good, were it true, must therefore ultimately 
be true? These questions resolve themselves into 
one question — Is there a God? Ordering and per- 
vading all things, is there the will of a rational, 
righteous and loving God? 

Wherever the most vivid, operative, fruitful 
faith in personal immortality has been reached, 
it has been reached by the path of religious faith 
and held with the certainty of religious experience. 
The most striking illustration of this fact, that 
faith in God, a God who is almighty and good, 
holds within it the assurance of immortality (even 
if only in the germ), is found in the religion of 
the Old Testament. The gropings and strag- 
glings by which Hebrew faith advanced from the 
dreary belief in the ghost-life of Sheol to the ex- 
ultant certainty, "He shall swallow up Death in 
victory" is the most impressive picture in the 
spiritual history of mankind of the necessity the 
human soul is under, in its highest and best mo- 
ments, to believe that the present world does not 
furnish a satisfying ideal of human life, nor fulfil 
the purpose of one who can be fully trusted and 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 19 

adored as God. At first Israel had scarcely any 
ideas about the future, and those it had it shrank 
from in horror. But Israel had God, and that 
was everything. Its faith in God was greater 
and richer than it knew (as ours, too, may be 
greater and richer than we know), and among its 
stored-up treasures, which it needed centuries of 
the teaching of experience and the guidance of 
the Spirit to bring forth, was the hope of immor- 
tality. "Like Bunyan's pilgrim, the faith of 
Israel unconsciously carried the key of Promise 
in its bosom even when it was in the dungeons of 
Giant Despair.' ' 

And so it is still. If the great hope is to be 
more than a theological dictum or a comatose re- 
ligious tradition, if it is to be a truth that is quick 
and powerful, touching experience at many vital 
points, influencing the whole outlook upon life, not 
an unrealized asset but a true soul-possession, it 
is still along this same path of faith and experi- 
ence that it must be won. The hope of personal 
immortality stands or falls with faith in a per- 
sonal God, and the realization of what that implies. 

To believe in God is to believe in the rationality 
of things. And, let it be said once more, if life 
leads only to death, and the whole stream of hu- 
man history, carrying in it the life-blood of all the 
generations, vanishes at last in the abyss of final 
nothingness, it is most like an idiot's tale, "full of 
sound and fury, signifying nothing." But this 
pessimistic conclusion we cannot seriously enter- 



20 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

tain. We cannot soberly believe that we ourselves 
are a product of irrationality, and that this world 
in which we live is the result of accident. There 
is too much good in it for that, too much wisdom, 
beauty and goodness, too much happiness and 
love. But if we are sure that this is God's world, 
that it has emanated from a Being who is wise, 
and just and good, we must be equally sure that 
it is not God's best world — there is too much evil 
in it for that, too much that is imperfect, dis- 
cordant, disappointing. 

When we contemplate our own nature we find 
that we are made with capacities to which the 
present life never has been and never can be ade- 
quate. Such is our capacity for happiness. To 
the most fortunate in circumstances, to the most 
fervent in piety, there come dreams of a happi- 
ness beyond anything that has been or ever will 
be experienced in this life. There is in us a capac- 
ity for truth which points beyond the limits of 
our present state. The quest for truth has been 
laid upon us, we know not how; and the further 
we advance in this quest the further off does the 
goal appear. Those who know most know best 
that they have but touched the fringes of knowl- 
edge; and there is in us all an instinct which 
rises up to welcome the assurance that many 
things we know not now, we shall know hereafter. 
Deeper still, there is in us an inextinguishable 
capacity for goodness. If we know that we are 
capable of being far happier and wiser, we are 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 21 

still more conscious that we are capable of being 
far better than we are or are ever likely to be in 
this life ; for, again, it is those who have advanced 
furthest in the pursuit of goodness who also see 
the greatest distances still to be traversed, and to 
the very end are forgetting the things behind and 
reaching forth to those that are before. There 
is in us a capacity for service which this life never 
exhausts. "The petty done, the undone vast," is 
still the cry of our struggling, aspiring humanity; 
and it is not easily conceivable that the vast pow- 
ers for service personalized in a' Paul, a Luther or 
a Lincoln are forever dissipated because a heart 
ceases to beat. There is a content in such per- 
sonalities that is never fully expressed in their 
work. If life is on a rational basis the words, 
"faithful in a few things,' ' demand the sequel, 
"be thou lord over many things.' ' And love 
stretches out both hands across the gulf of death. 
It revolts against the suggestion that all we have 
learned and suffered and meant for others, and 
all that others have learned and suffered and 
meant for us, is suddenly to be ended by the guil- 
lotine of death. To know that every hour that 
binds us more closely to each other, that makes us 
more fit to love and be loved, is only a step towards 
love's extinction, would rob us of any belief that 
the scheme of things in which our lives are set is 
to be trusted. To suppose that we are endowed 
with such capacities for happiness, for goodness 
and knowledge and service and love, and that 



22 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

when these capacities have been partially devel- 
oped and we have learned a little how to live and 
have acquired some fitness for a place in God's 
universe — to suppose that just then we die and 
there is an end of us, is to suppose that God, if 
there is a God, takes the rough ore out of the 
mine, smelts it and changes it into fine steel, forges 
it into weapons for His use, tempers and polishes 
them, and then one day, in His caprice, breaks 
them in pieces and scatters their fragments to 
the void. "What profit is there in my blood, 
when I go down to the pit?" The Psalmist's 
question goes to the root of the matter. To be- 
lieve in God is to trust the rationality of life, and 
to trust the rationality of life is to believe in the 
life to come. When the death of a British officer, 
killed in action, was announced to a brother-officer 

who had been long his friend: " dead!" he 

exclaimed, "it'll take more than that to stop him. 
He'll carry on." It will take more than that to 
stop the career of any faithful life. We shall 
have the "glory of going on." 

And to believe in God is to believe that there is 
an ultimate righteousness in things, that there is 
a moral order, a conscience in the universe, which 
distinguishes between right and wrong, and re- 
acts upon the right-doer and the wrong-doer, ac- 
cording to their character. It is said by critics 
of the doctrine of personal immortality that the 
important thing is, not that we should survive, 
but that the things we care for shall survive, that 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 23 

these are valued in the universe on the whole as 
they are by us. But one of the things we thus 
care for is justice. A universe without justice 
would be an irrational universe; a radically un- 
just universe would be an infinite crime. We 
have a deep conviction that the ground-law of the 
universe ought to be such as will vindicate the 
right and every one who is faithful to it ; and by 
equal necessity redress the wrong and meet the 
arrogant and impenitent wrongdoer with the full 
force of its antagonism. But certainly this con- 
viction is never fully justified in the present world. 
If it is true, as doubtless it is, that "history has 
a nemesis for every crime/' in probably a major- 
ity of cases, it is not upon the perpetrator of the 
crime that its nemesis falls. If it is true that 
"the history of the world is the judgment of the 
world," that is a text on which it is often possible 
to preach that "might is right' ' as plausibly as 
that l ' right is might. ' ' The moral order demands 
another stage than that of this world for its full 
development. If Christ and Herod, Paul and 
Nero, if the criminals who have brought this cata- 
clysm of war upon the world — if they and their 
helpless victims and their heroic resisters drop 
through the trap-door of death into the same un- 
awakening sleep ; if any man can shuffle out of the 
consequences of his deeds simply by dying, as all 
men must, existence is built on no principle of 
righteousness. The sufferings of innocence, the 
frequent impunity of wrong, callous selfishness 



24 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

flourishing, love trampled upon and crucified — 
Dives eating the fat and drinking the sweet, 
Lazarus rotting at his gate — these are facts of 
this life, and if the Power who conducts the world 
is to be called righteous, there must be other facts 
beyond. The criticism, that this belief in the ulti- 
mate righteousness of things means on the one 
hand a desire to be paid for doing our duty, and 
on the other hand a thirst for vengeance, is merely 
unintelligent. To say that men are responsible 
if it means anything, means that they must some- 
how, somewhere, somewhen, respond. There must 
come a time when in the light of truth the hidden 
shall be made open, and the open revealed in its 
true colors, and all falsehood and self-deception 
wither away. This is as necessary for the wrong- 
doer as for the righteous ; and without it life would, 
morally, lead to no conclusion at all. 

But for those who accept the revelation of God 
in Christ, there is yet firmer ground. To believe 
in God is to believe not only in rationality and 
righteousness, it is to believe in a perfect and 
eternal Love at the heart of life. It is to believe 
in a love that is more than benevolence, a love that 
sets its desire upon each of us by himself and for 
himself, that is afflicted in our afflictions, wronged 
in our wrongs, wounded and grieved by our sins, 
that has gone to the Cross for us and sought us 
through the gates of Death and Hell. We are 
not ripples on the surface of an oceanic Absolute. 
We are not tools of a Great Artificer to be used 



THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 25 

until blunted and worn out, then flung aside. We 
are not God's workmen whom He may calmly bury, 
relay after relay, provided that the work goes on. 
We are His children holding each a place in His 
love which no substitute can ever occupy, to whom 
He has bound Himself with ties which not even 
sin, much less time, can sever. If we believe in 
God by Jesus Christ, if to our souls the Love of 
God which is in Him shines in its own light as 
the Supreme Eeality, we are on the surest foun- 
dation as regards the life to come. We need no 
spiritualistic manifestations, no far-fetched meta- 
physical reasonings. In Christ we have found 
God, a God whom frail, mortal and sinful as we 
are, we can trust, trust for ourselves, for those 
whom we love and for all men; trust for to-day 
and for to-morrow, for the great step into the 
unseen and for what lies beyond it, knowing that 
whatever unimaginable changes may be in store 
for mortals there, all of blessed and good each is 
capable of receiving He will ever bestow. 



II: THE HEREAFTER IN THE OLD 
TESTAMENT 



II 

The Hereafter in the Old Testament 

"If a man die, shall he live again?" — Job xiv:14. 

In beginning a series of sermons on the Fu- 
ture Life I wish to say that I have chosen this 
theme because of its practical importance. I am 
aware that with some, perhaps a growing number, 
the subject is not a popular one. The objection is 
taken that our vital interests and duties are here, 
and that it is unwise, needless if not hurtful, to 
occupy our minds with thoughts of a future to 
which, if it really exists, we shall be able to give 
due attention when we reach it. Meanwhile this 
world with its irrevocable opportunities, and with 
so much in it that needs to be put right, gives us 
enough to think about. This is apt to be called 
the "commonsense" view of the matter, but to me, 
I am bound to say, it does not appear in that light. 
As reasonably might one assert that a child ought 
to be brought up as if he were never to be more 
than ten years of age. To set the present life in 
the light of the hereafter is not to subtract the 
value and power of the future from those of the 
present, it is not even to add the one to the other, 
it is to multiply the one by the other. 

29 



30 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

It can never be other than a question of prac- 
tical and vital importance whether death is our 
goal, and all life's labour and achievement and 
discipline without a meaning for anything beyond ; 
all human history with its mixed good and evil, 
its sins and heroisms, its struggles and aspira- 
tions, only "the phantom caravan" which reaches 
at last the nothing it set out from, or whether it 
is advancing in accordance with an eternal pur- 
pose to eternal issues. It is a question to which 
the war with its colossal sacrifice of life has given 
a tragic intensity ; but always it is a question that 
lies behind all other questions and touches human 
experience at every point in the most vital way. 

I begin this evening with the Old Testament; 
and I do so for several reasons. First, because 
it is necessary to a proper understanding of the 
New Testament doctrine. Also, because to place 
ourselves back in Old Testament times and feel 
the weight of darkness which then brooded over 
the grave will help us to realize the vastness of 
the difference Christ has made. And then, again, 
because all is not darkness in the Old Testament. 
Gleams of hope, and more than hope, break forth 
and grow brighter and stronger as time advances ; 
and in these gropings and strugglings of Old Tes- 
tament faith towards the light we have the most 
impressive proof which the spiritual history of 
mankind anywhere furnishes of the necessity laid 
upon the human soul by its own highest and best 
experiences to believe that this world and this 



HEREAFTER IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 31 

life are not its whole inheritance, that they do 
not represent a satisfying ideal, nor fulfil the pur- 
pose of a good God. 

To deal with the subject in broad outline, which 
is all I can attempt, it may be said that throughout 
the Old Testament we find belief in a future state. 
No more than the ancient Greek or Egyptian did 
the ancient Hebrew imagine that his existence 
wholly terminated when his body was laid in the 
tomb. But in this belief there was no consolation, 
no hope. There was continued existence of a sort, 
but it was existence in the realms of Death. The 
abode of the departed was Sheol, a vast gloomy 
region under the earth into which Death shep- 
herded the generations of men, one after another. 
The pathetic variety of names by which it is de- 
scribed shews what it represented to the imagina- 
tion of these early ages. It is the "pit," the " lower 
parts of the earth/ ' the place of silence, the land 
of darkness and the shadow of death. There, in 
this shadowy, ghostly prison, the shades or ghosts 
of those who had once been the living continued 
a ghostly, futile existence, bloodless, voiceless, 
without strength, memory, knowledge or any en- 
ergy of interest or affection, a weakened edition 
of their former selves, vegetating in dumbness and 
vacancy. If death was not extinction, it was the 
utter and final paralysis of life. 

Sometimes, indeed, under a great load of 
trouble, men did look forward to this torpid after- 
life with longing, for there "the wicked cease from 



32 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

troubling and the weary are at rest. ' ' But it was 
only when life was most intolerable that men could 
thus envy the peace of the dead. Beyond that 
" bourne from which no traveller returns" there 
was nothing that the heart should desire. To de- 
part thither was to go down into silence, to be cut 
off from the "land of the living/ ' from all the 
quick, warm, interests that give life its meaning 
and savour. ' ' The living know that they shall die ; 
but the dead know not anything. Their love, their 
hatred and their envy are now perished." 

But to the Old Testament believer bitterest of 
all the privations of Sheol, dreariest of its antici- 
pations, was its separation from God. The most 
pathetic words in the Old Testament are those 
which express this despair of godly souls. The 
good King Hezekiah, as he looks death in the face, 
mourns, "I shall behold man no more with the 
inhabitants of the world ;" but saddest thought of 
all is this, ' i I shall not see Jehovah in the land of 
the living. The living, the living, he shall praise 
Thee, as I do this day. The father to the children 
shall make known Thy truth. But Sheol cannot 
praise Thee; they that go down to the pit cannot 
hope for Thy faithfulness." Such was the belief 
about the hereafter during the greater part of the 
Old Testament period. Even men of the most 
fervent piety and lively faith shrank with repug- 
nance from the prospect. They looked into these 
depths which Christ has flooded with light and 
saw nothing but gloom, "a stagnant sea which no 



HEREAFTER IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 33 

ripple of cheerful activity ever stirs, and on which 
God's Face never shines/ ' 

We still read part of our funeral scriptures from 
the Old Testament and always shall, because there 
is no music in all the world so fit to utter the pa- 
thos of man's mortality as that which comes from 
the Hebrew lyre. But when we listen to these sad- 
voiced utterances, and then listen to the raptur- 
ous longings of St. Paul to depart and be with 
Christ, or behold the glowing visions of the New 
Testament Apocalypse, in which we can almost 
gaze upon the white robes of the purified and the 
triumphant ranks of the victorious, we may ask 
how it was possible for those Old Testament 
saints, who had such a vision of God and such 
assurance of fellowship with Him, to rest in such 
a view of the future ? The truth is that they did 
not rest in it, In their deepest feeling they often 
revolted against it. The Psalms, for example, 
are full of such revolt. Psalmist after Psalmist 
lifts his voice in protest. For God to suffer His 
people to go down into the pit was to rob them 
of their one opportunity of experiencing His love 
and faithfulness. " Shall Thy loving kindness be 
declared in the grave? Shall Thy wonders be 
known in the dark? Thy righteousness in the 
land of forgetfulness?" Nay, more, it was to de- 
prive God Himself of their love and service. 
" What profit is there in my blood, when I go down 
into the pit? In death there is no remembrance 
of Thee. In Sheol who can give Thee thanks ?" 



34 THE HOPE OF OUE CALLING 

The Psalmist's inmost soul rebels against the ac- 
cepted belief — the cruelty of it, the sheer sense- 
lessness and irrationality of it. "What profit is 
there in my blood, when I go down to the pit ? " He 
protests against it, yet he accepts it. The time 
came, however, when Old Testament faith did not 
accept it even under protest, but driven forward 
by the facts of experience and strengthened by 
the Spirit of God rose above it and reached out 
after a better hope. 

How was it then, that Old Testament faith, 
though it did not rest, remained so long at this 
point? To answer that question fully would be 
to undertake a complex study; but briefly this was 
due to three concurrent causes, three imperfect 
conceptions which Hebrew faith had to outgrow, 
and did, more or less simultaneously, outgrow. 

The first was an imperfect conception of God. 
In its earliest stage the Hebrew conception of 
God was scarcely more than national. Jehovah 
was Israel's covenant God. He was not yet re- 
ceived as the one Living and True God, God of all 
the Earth; and still less could His presence and 
power be regarded as extending to the under 
world. But Hebrew faith was not to remain sta- 
tionary at this level. There came to it the loftier 
and larger vision of Jehovah not only as Israel's 
God, but as above all the Eighteous God. And as 
righteousness is everywhere righteousness, not 
of any land or people, but universally and eter- 
nally the same, so the God of righteousness must 



HEREAFTER IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 35 

be everywhere God, and alone God, the One God 
of Heaven and Earth, reigning also in whatever 
unseen realms of existence there might be for men 
after death. Sinners could not escape His hand 
even in Sheol; nor there could His people be be- 
yond the reach of His love and care. He was not 
only able to save them temporarily from going 
down to the pit, He could redeem them from its 
power. 

A second reason was an imperfect conception 
of the Divine Government of the World. For 
long men did not realize the need of a future life 
to redress the inequalities and injustices of the 
present. They believed, like Job's friends, that 
here, in the present life, good and bad alike get 
their full deserts, and reap what they sow. "Be- 
hold the righteous shall be recompensed on the 
earth ; how much more the wicked and the sinner/ ' 
But in course of time this position was felt to be 
untenable. Notwithstanding all the orthodox 
might say, it was plain that justice was not fully 
done on earth. Any one could see that in this 
world it is often the wicked and worthless who 
eat the fat and drink the sweet, while better people 
have a full cup of sorrow and adversity given them 
to drink. 

A third reason was that in the early period re- 
ligion was national, rather than individual. The 
religious unit, the object of God's favour and the 
goal of His purpose, was the People of Israel, the 
elect Nation. What though the individual Israel- 



36 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

ife' passed away? Israel still survived; the Na- 
tion as a whole might still fulfil God's purpose and 
enjoy a full and satisfying experience of His faith- 
fulness. God could bury the worker and still 
carry on the work. But with the decay and down- 
fall of the Nation in the Exile there came a great 
advance to a more personal conception of religion. 
It was felt that true religion is a personal fellow- 
ship with God. This was especially the message 
of the great prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel. 
" All souls are mine. ' ' A loving and righteous God 
does not care merely for the mass, but for the man ; 
not merely for the work, but for the workman. 
Men are not God's tools, to be thrown aside when 
their use is past ; they are His people, the sheep of 
His pasture, to whom He has bound Himself by 
indissoluble ties. And thus when Old Testament 
faith looked forward to the glorious Kingdom of 
God, in which it firmly believed, the question 
necessarily arose : What of those who had laboured 
and suffered for the Kingdom before its advent? 
What of the saints and martyrs of past genera- 
tions? Were they destined to have no share in 
its triumph ; or could their only share be that they 
had suffered and shed their blood for its sake? 
The answer was given in a new word — Resurrec- 
tion. The righteous dead would rise again; they 
would enter into a blessed resurrection — life in 
fellowship with the faithful of all ages. The later 
Prophets triumph in this great and blessed hope. 
The answer they give to Job's question, "If a 



HEREAFTER IN THE OLP TESTAMENT 37 

man die, shall he live again 1 ' ' is one of rapturous 
affirmation. ' ' Thy dead shall live ; thy dead bodies 
shall arise. Awake and shout for joy, ye dwellers 
in the dust. ' ' Such in brief outline is the story of 
the development of Old Testament faith in the 
Life to come; such was the path along which it 
advanced from the dreary belief in the ghost-exist- 
ence of Sheol to the assurance that Death will be 
altogether abolished in the time of consumma- 
tion. 

"He shall swallow up Death in victory, and the 
Lord God will wipe away tears from off all 
faces. ,, 

It is an outstandingly wonderful example of 
Divine education, of the way in which God by the 
teaching of experience and the guidance of His 
spirit leads humanity forward in the way of truth. 
And what I now wish to point out is, that it is only 
by the same education and along the same path 
that any of us can come to a living and fruitful 
faith in personal immortality. 



[The conclusion of this Sermon was substantially indentical 
with that of the preceding one, beginning at the asterisks on 
page 16, to which therefore, the reader is referred.] 



Ill: DEATH, BLESSING OR CURSE? 



HI 

Death, Blessing oe Curse? 

"The sting of death is sin." — 1 Corinthians xv:56. 

Is death a curse, or is it a blessing? Consider- 
ing it merely as a fact of nature, we must answer 
that it partakes of both characters. Nothing can 
make it other than the pathetic event over which 
the generations mourn; yet it is at once evident 
that, things being as they are, the death of the 
individual is a benefit or rather a necessity to the 
life and progress of the race. It is true that 
according to the teaching of the Bible death is 
due to sin ; it is the ' i wages of sin. ' ' We shall con- 
sider later on what that means ; for the present let 
us observe what it cannot mean. It cannot mean 
that man, even if he were morally perfect, could 
ever have been intended to remain permanently 
in this terrestrial state of being. 

Without death, existence in a small world like 
this would soon become a physical impossibility. 
Within a hundred generations the earth would 
not have furnished standing room for the de- 
scendants of the first man. Even from this ele- 
mentary point of view we cannot but see a benig- 

41 



42 THE HOPE OF OUE CALLING 

nity in death. Death does not diminish, it multi- 
plies, boundlessly multiplies, the number of the 
living. It calls up fresh generations to the 
perennial banquet of existence. In a deathless 
world there could be no upspringing of young life, 
no infusion of fresh energies and ideas. "The 
torch of life instead of glowing with new fire as 
it is handed on by each generation to its successor 
would smoulder in the stiffened grasp of a single 
age. ' ' The rich warm blood of youth would never 
irrigate and vitalize the roots of thought and 
feeling. If we lived forever, the world would 
become frost bound as a Polar sea. 

But not only for the race, for the individual too, 
for ourselves, the fact that we are mortal is of 
inestimable benefit. We complain that life is 
short ; we know the pathetic thoughts and emotions 
that come flocking up around that fact; but who 
would not dread to have his life begin to seem 
long? We complain that the enjoyments of life 
are of brief duration, like "snow upon the desert's 
dusty face, ' ' which "lighting a little hour or two is 
gone" ; but is it not this limitation that gives them 
their intensity? There is no earthly pleasure 
which, if it could be prolonged indefinitely, would 
not become utterly insipid. We complain that 
life is short for the work we have to do, that it is 
so often a race against time ; but is not this better 
than that it should be a dawdle against nothing at 
all? Is it not this that gives the weight and im- 
petus of concentrated effort by which alone any 



DEATH, BLESSING OR CURSE? 43 

work is ever well done? What hard task would 
ever be accomplished if we could f.lways postpone 
it till to-morrow; if the student, for instance, in- 
stead of taking five years to his course might as 
well take fifty? We complain that death ravages 
our affections; but again does not the conscious- 
ness that we hold our loves and friendships on a 
tenure which is so limited and always precarious 
do much to deepen and refine them? Even as it 
is, we may be hard and selfish enough, God knows ; 
but what would be the result if we had no reminder 
of mortality and never felt that we must love each 
other well while we may, because some day we 
must part ? We complain that the fashion of this 
world passeth away; but if even with death star- 
ing us in the face we are, nine tenths of us, so de- 
voted to material objects, how should we escape 
being utter worldlings, if we held these on a lease 
of indefinite continuance? Take away death, and 
in how short a time would the multitude of men 
lose all sense of the eternal! 

Considered thus, death is no curse but a bless- 
ing. It is an inestimable advantage in every way 
that we are mortal ; nor can we doubt that our days 
are rightly numbered, that God in His wisdom 
has assigned to our earthly life that normal dura- 
tion which is best adapted to its activities and 
enjoyments as well as to its higher purposes of 
spiritual discipline and development. 

Yet we feel that this is not the whole truth about 
death, nor the deepest truth. Death may be a 



44 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

necessity, but it is a sad necessity; it may bring 
rich blessings, but it brings them through an un- 
blessed channel. Death is death ; and we feel that 
we have never known what it is to live, how good 
it is to see the light and breathe the common air, 
to gaze upon loved faces around us and take our 
part in the great life of the world, until we have 
looked upon the face of death. In vain does the 
New Paganism glorify death, telling us that 
"nothing can happen more beautiful than death"; 
in vain does it speak of * ' delicate death, lovely and 
soothing death"; and bid us go forth to meet it 
with "dances and chants of fullest welcome.' ' 
Poets' may put what adjectives, before what nouns 
they will, but death is not delicate, lovely, or wel- 
come. Death is death, and it is not robbed of its 
sting by fanciful epithets. There is a famous 
picture by Watts — you may have seen engravings 
of it — of Love and Death. Death with bowed 
head and resistless stride, as if sent on his mission 
by some compelling power, is pressing in at the 
doorway of a home. The child, Love, stands with 
uplifted arm and eyes of anguished appeal, as if 
to stay the advance of the silent and terrible in- 
truder. But we see that the child must be borne 
down by that foe ; we foresee Love lying crushed 
on the threshold, and the home filled with the 
gloom of the i ' shadow feared by man. ' ' Nothing, 
no poetry, no philosophy, no religion will ever 
make death, as a natural event, other than what it 
is — death, the final bankruptcy of life. 



DEATH, BLESSING OR CURSE? 45 

So far I have spoken of death simply as a fact 
of nature. When we turn to the specific teaching 
of the Bible regarding death, we find that it both 
vastly deepens the shadows, and as vastly 
heightens the lights that fall upon it. The Bible 
does not view the death of man as merely a fact 
of nature, because it does not view man himself 
as merely a part of nature, like a tree or an ani- 
mal. Man is spiritual, related to God, belonging 
to the spiritual world; and for man both life and 
death have spiritual significance. Man is made for 
participation in the eternal life of goodness, truth 
and love, the life of God; and for him death, the 
loss of that higher divine life, is such a death as 
nature knows not. It is not to fade as the leaves 
fade in autumn in order to make way for the 
fresh foliage of spring; it is not to lie down and 
be at rest when the day of toil has reached its 
close. No, in itself and without Christ, it is a 
curse— the uttermost of all curses; an evil — the 
sum of all evils, — a penalty and a doom — the sum 
and end of all penalty and all doom. Look at the 
vivid and terrible picture St. Paul here sets before 
us. ' ' The sting of death is sin. ' ' He represents 
Death as a venomous serpent, a monstrous reptile, 
which slays men by its sting; and the sting, the 
poisonous fang, with which it inflicts the deadly 
wound is sin. Everywhere, from Genesis to Reve- 
lation, the teaching of the Bible is the same. It 
is sin that brings us under the power of death. 
Death is the wages of sin. 



46 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

Think of that for a little. Try to realize its 
meaning and its truth. Man does not live by- 
bread alone. To eat and drink and breathe and 
work and rest is not life. All that we have in 
common with the beasts that perish. The true 
life of man is that which he has in common with 
the highest and best, with God whose image he 
bears. It is to think the truth, which is God's 
thought; to will the good, which is God's will; to 
love what God loves, to act as God acts — in a word, 
to have the Spirit of God; in another word, to 
have that life which we behold in its full stature 
and perfection in Jesus Christ. That is life. 
The Bible will not allow us, and, if our eyes have 
caught any vision of its truth, we shall not allow 
ourselves, to call anything else than that Life. 
And the opposite of all that is sin. Sin makes us 
think the opposite of what God thinks, and will 
the opposite, and love and act the opposite of what 
God wills and loves — makes us believe a lie, makes 
us will and love and act what is wrong instead of 
what is right. Therefore sin brings forth death. 
Just as a stream cut off from its source or a 
branch severed from the tree dies, so man 
separated from God withers and dies. Not his 
soul only or his body, but the whole man, all that 
constitutes the human personality. Death is the 
sum-total of all that results from sin and separa- 
tion from God. It is death of the soul, death to 
all that is good and true; but it is death also of 



DEATH, BLESSING OR CURSE? 47 

the body, the physical counterpart of the soul. It 
is death here and death hereafter. 

Such is the Bible's way of thinking. I am 
afraid that it is not very familiar to us; and it 
presents obvious difficulties. It is difficult to con- 
ceive of bodily death as a moral consequence, the 
result of sin. Yet it is quite clear that it is the 
death of the body St. Paul is specially thinking 
of here, when he says that the sting of death is 
sin. For what is the victory over death for which 
he cries "Thanks be to God"; what is it that ex- 
tracts its sting and heals the mortal wound? It 
is the Resurrection of the body, that this corrupt- 
ible shall put on incorruption and this mortal put 
on immortality. Then shall death be swallowed 
up in "victory"; foi then all that death has done 
will be undone, and much more than undone. All 
that it has laid its defacing and destroying hand 
upon will be restored in imperishable and far 
nobler form. Yet, I say, there are obvious diffi- 
culties. I have spoken of the impossibility of 
supposing that man, even in an ideal state, could 
have continued permanently in this earthly mode 
of existence. And if St. Paul were here among 
us, we might ask him how the translation from 
the earthly to the heavenly state, the laying 
aside of the body of flesh and blood and the put- 
ting on of the vesture of immortality, could ever 
have taken place except through death or a physi- 
cal equivalent to death. He is not here to answer 
the question, but if he had been, he might have 



48 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

replied that he could not profess to explain this 
any more than he conld explain the mystery of 
the Resurrection. Perhaps he would have been 
content to say that the transition into another 
state of being would not have had that character 
which death, as we know it, has. It would have 
been not so much death as simply birth into a 
higher state of being. Filled with the sure hope 
of everlasting life it would have been an entirely 
different experience, as it in fact does become 
a different experience to those for whom Christ 
has taken away its ghostly terrors. 

That is at any rate the practical truth of the 
matter. In calm exultation of Christian faith we 
sing: 

It is not death to die, 

To leave this weary road 
And 'midst the brotherhood on high 

To be at home with God. 

It is sin that does make it death to die. Sin is 
the thing that ought not to be, that has no right to 
exist; and it is sin that makes one unfit to live 
and makes it a moral doom to die. It is sin that 
makes death a penal thing to the worldly man, 
wrenching him away from everything that has 
been his life, his ambitions and possessions, his 
work and his enjoyments, pushing him out from 
the one world where his heart and his treasure are, 
dismissing him as to a foreign land, friendless and 
destitute. It is sin that makes death penal to the 
man who has a guilty secret hidden in his life, who 



DEATH, BLESSING OR CURSE? 49 

has foully injured some one, or done some of the 
things that leave on the soul the dark spot that 
will not come out. When such a man sees death 
near, like the criminal who feels the detective's 
grip on his shoulder, he knows that his hour is 
come. It would be a mistake however to suppose 
that this is the way in which sin commonly asserts 
itself as the sting of death. Those who carry a 
guilty secret to the grave are few. It is not so 
much what men have done as what they are, or 
rather what they are not, that makes death to be 
feared. It is the feeling that God is not their 
friend, that death is hostile and that what lies 
beyond it, if there is anything beyond, must be 
hostile too. It is the unspiritual man's instinc- 
tive dread of the unseen. The sting of death, 
that which makes it a moral doom, is sin. Has 
Christ taken away that sting for you and me? 

For that is the final truth. Christ utterly 
changes the character of death. By redeeming 
from sin he delivers from death. He does not 
grant us escape from passing through that narrow 
door through which He Himself has gone ; but He 
makes it for us, as for Himself, the door of life, 
the gateway of blessing. The transformation of 
death is one of the unending marvels of Christian 
faith. Outwardly death bears the same aspect. 
It comes in no gentler form, with no more obse- 
quious mien. Yet how completely different is the 
reality! The cloud has become merely a back- 
ground for the splendour of the rainbow. And 



50 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

this is because Christian faith deals so honestly 
with the fact of death. It does not attempt to 
soften the harshness of its features; it does not 
tell us that "nothing can happen more beautiful 
than death"; it does not try to light up the valley 
of the shadow with any artificial glare. It deals 
in the prof oundest way with the problem of death. 
It insists that the sting of death is sin. It is be- 
cause we are not in harmony with God and the 
laws of the Eternal life that we are subject to the 
power of death. It is this that makes us always 
afraid of what lies in the unseen, afraid even of 
the unseen to-morrow, and most of all afraid of 
that great step into the unseen which we call 
death. And the Christian Gospel begins the work 
of our deliverance at the true centre, begins not 
with the problem of death but with the problem 
of sin, by reconciling us unto God, by giving us in 
Christ a God whom, sinners as we are, we can 
trust to the uttermost, trust in life and trust in 
death. When Christ takes away sin, when he sets 
us right with God and the spiritual universe, He 
takes away everything in death that is a curse and 
leaves only the blessing. 

He takes away everything in the past that can 
make death a curse. It is no longer the officer 
of justice who, when long impunity has lulled the 
criminal into forgetfulne*ss, lays a stern hand 
upon him and says, You are my prisoner. In 
Christ we have redemption through His blood, 
the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins ! 



DEATH, BLESSING OR CURSE? 51 

The past has no fatal claim upon us. It has no 
terror. The past can never separate us from the 
love of God. And Christ takes away everything 
in the future that could make death a curse. 
What is Death? A sleep and an awaking. A 
birth. Yes, that is what death is for Christian 
faith — birth into a greater, more perfect life. 
"Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." 
How blessed! It is they who are the living, we 
who are only half alive. 

''The dead! Is it you who call us dead? 

What! You who wait for the birth, 
Who wait to pass hence from the prison of sense, 

From the body and brain of earth? 
Oh, why do you name the living dead, 

Who think and act with the force 
Of the light that from far, that from star to star 

Moves on in its wondrous course V 

And Christ takes away everything in the pass- 
age from the present to the future that is a curse, 
Brethren, none of us can say much about that ; we 
have never made that passage, nor heard that 
messenger's call. But we do know that if the 
messenger has a grim and ghastly look, it is the 
message of love he bears. We know that if there 
is darkness in that passage, there is a Presence 
there, and a Voice that says as of old, "It is I, be 
not afraid. " All this we know. We know that no 
life that has aught of Christ in it can ever die 
or suffer diminution, that for such a life Death is 
but the liberating angel who leads it forth to 



52 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

higher powers and fuller opportunities. Yet 
death is still an ordeal, the last ordeal of faith. 
The flesh is weak ; the instinctive dread is strong. 
Darwin tells how at one time he often visited the 
London Zoological Gardens, and, standing by the 
glass case which contained the deadly cobra, used 
to put his forehead against the glass while the 
venomous creature struck at him. The strong 
sheet of glass was between; there was no danger 
and he knew there was none; yet whenever the 
cobra struck he recoiled. Time after time he put 
forth his utmost effort to master this instinctive 
dread, but always it proved too strong for his 
reason and his will. It may be much like that 
with the Christian's attitude towards death. He 
knows that its sting cannot touch him ; but natural 
instinct still recoils from the threatened stroke. 
Yet even this last remnant of fear is in a multi- 
tude of instances taken away; and death is met 
with the fervent energy of faith, with the welcome 
of one whose toilful pilgrimage is ended and 
whose next step is into the rest and bliss of Home. 
Seeking the grace of Christ to live well, we may 
safely trust for the same gracious help to die well. 
In the highest teaching of the New Testament, 
Life and Death are seen only as parts of one 
Divine whole. So also we have learned in these 
days to speak not of death, but of making the 
"supreme sacrifice.' ' The great words of the 
New Testament speak to us with a new self -inter- 
preting significance. He that loves his life loses 



DEATH, BLESSING OR CUKSE? 53 

it. He that gives it gains it. Greater love hath 
no man than this, to lay down his life. Death is 
sacrifice, and Life lives only by sacrifice. The 
Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ are the 
eternal proclamation of this; and every life that 
follows in His steps shall prove its truth. And 
though it may not be given to you and me to die 
what may be called the ideal death, to lay down 
all in one supreme moment, like the martyr and 
the soldier* it is ours so to follow Christ in His 
life of love and service that death shall only do 
for us what it did for Him — finish the work, per- 
fect the sacrifice, and become the entrance into 
the Greater Life. The dayspring shall become 
the day ; the seed cast into the ground bring forth 
its everlasting fruit. 



IV: THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 



IV] 

The Resurrection of Christ 

"But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first 
fruits of them that sleep.' ' — 1 Corinthians xv:20. 

When the Gospel of Christ was first preached 
it collided with all human preconceptions by hold- 
ing np to men as Saviour and Lord One whose 
earthly career had terminated in His dying a 
malefactor's death. The cross was to the Jews 
a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness. 
It is true, I think, that to modern thought it is not 
the Crucifixion, it is the Resurrection that is the 
greater obstacle. "We feel no difficulty where the 
early believers felt most difficulty, in the tre- 
mendous shame and sorrow and humiliation of 
the Cross. We feel the Divine glory of that— 

Love that made the Lord of all 
Drink the wormwood and the gall. 

The difficulty with us is the Resurrection. Yet 
why should it be? Is it because it is a great 
mystery? But a fact may be utterly mysterious 
as to its nature yet utterly certain as to its exist- 
ence and significance. What is there that is with- 

57 



58 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

out mystery? The tiniest thing you see, the com- 
monest thing you touch has its mystery. You 
yourself are a mystery. Existence itself, the mere 
fact that anything is, is the greatest mystery of 
all. You cannot take any simplest fact of ex- 
perience and try to think down to the root of it 
without having to confess that the existence we 
see and know is but the surface of an existence 
whose depths we cannot fathom. If we could un- 
derstand the "flower in the crannied wall," "roots 
and all," we should "understand what God and 
man is." The growth of a blade of grass is a 
mystery, the result of an inscrutable power, no 
less than the creation of a world or than resurrec- 
tion from the dead. 

It is said, however, that resurrection is incred- 
ible because it is contrary to the laws by which 
existence is uniformly governed. But who can 
claim to assert this from an exhaustive knowledge 
of these laws? Suppose that the minnow in its 
pool, the frog in its ditch, knew the laws of the 
pool or of the ditch, would it be entitled thereby to 
pronounce the ocean-tides incredible? What we 
in our large way call the order of nature is only 
what we have been able to observe of the order 
of nature, and that only by means of our five 
senses. What lies beyond our present opportuni- 
ties and powers of observation, who can tell? If 
we lived in a world where for a long period the 
population was stationary, where for thousands 
of years there had been neither birth nor death, in 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 59 

such a world what a miracle either of these events 
would appear — antecedently how incredible ! And 
I should like to know on what principles of reason 
we ought to hold it incredible that in some larger 
order of nature yet to be unfolded to our knowl- 
edge, resurrection — the changing of a mortal and 
corruptible body into a body that is spiritual and 
incorruptible and fitted for a higher stage of ex- 
istence — is just such an event as birth is here, 
every whit as natural and no whit more mysteri- 
ous. I believe that on the other side of the veil 
it is so that resurrection will appear — simply as 
the birth into the heavenly state of being. 

But I must not linger on the threshold of my 
subject. My purpose in this sermon and the next 
of the series is not to deal with the credibility of 
Eesurrection, but to exhibit its meaning; and to 
any who may be in difficulty let me say from my 
own experience that the first step towards assur- 
ance of its credibility is to understand its mean- 
ing. 

In the first sermon of the series I endeavoured 
to explain the belief which was held in Old Testa- 
ment times about the future state. There was a 
future state — a future life it could not be called. 
For good and bad alike there was only the dreary 
ghost-existence in Sheol, feeble and futile and 
without possibility of deliverance, existence in 
the realm of death. And we saw how Old Testa- 
ment faith could not rest in this, but at last in the 
course of a wonderful Divine education attained 



60 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

to a better hope. For in the heart of Old Testa- 
ment religion there was always the unquenchable 
belief in the salvation of God — that God would 
come and not keep silence, that He would send His 
Messiah to establish the Divine Kingdom and to 
make His faithful people inherit it. And by and 
by the thought came — what of the suffering saints 
of God whom death had swept away in the past, 
whom death was even now sweeping away, before 
their eyes could behold that glorious advent? 
And with the question came the answer. God's 
Israel would not in that day mourn its dead sons 
and daughters. They would be raised up. The 
pit of Sheol would give back its prey to life and 
joy. Such is the belief as we find it in the latest 
writings of the Old Testament. Aoid such is still 
the belief we find in the New Testament ; with the 
difference, that Sheol or Hades, the region into 
which men go at death, was thought of as divided 
into two separate abodes — the one, Paradise or 
Abraham's Bosom, the resting place of the 
righteous ; the other Gehenna or the ' l outer dark- 
ness, ' ' the place of retribution for the wicked and 
ungodly. Still, the one was not the everlasting 
Hell, nor was the other the final Glory. This was 
to be reached only at the Resurrection, when 
God's Kingdom should come in power. Such was 
the belief held in Our Lord's time, not universally, 
but certainly in the circles from which His disci- 
ples were drawn. When, for example, He said to 
Martha, "Thy brother shall rise again," she at 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 61 

once concurred, ' ' I know that he will rise again at 
the Last Day." 

Let us try then to think ourselves back into the 
place of Our Lord's disciples and to conceive what 
their thoughts must have been about the after- 
life into which their Master had gone, when His 
body was laid in Joseph's tomb. He had sought 
to strengthen their faith beforehand. He had 
foretold His death, but also His Resurrection. 
" In My Father's house are many mansions," He 
had said, "I go to prepare a place for you." 
Their sacred fellowship would not be broken by 
His death, but only perfected. But when the 
black storm burst and the crashing blow fell, all 
this was forgotten and blotted out. If in the stu- 
por of their grief they thought at all about His 
future, what would their thought be? They be- 
lieved that they had found in Him the Eedeemer 
of Israel; but He was dead. That had befallen 
Him which befalls all men. And after death that 
would befall Him which befell any good man when 
he died. His body was resting in the tomb; His 
soul, or shade, was resting and was comforted in 
Abraham's Bosom. He would rise again, yes, 
at the Last Day, when the Messiah came; but as 
for His being Himself the Messiah, the Quickener 
of the dead, that was a vanished dream. He 
Himself had become Death's victim, had gone 
away into the dim land of shadows, away from all 
communion with the living. This, as you may ob- 
serve, is exactly the conception of the case which 



62 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

is revealed in the conduct of the disciples after 
the Resurrection. When the Master so suddenly 
appeared in their midst, saying " Peace be unto 
you," their immediate thought was that, just as 
in that strange Old Testament narrative the shade 
or ghost of Samuel comes up from the underworld 
to visit Saul, so now it was the ghost of their dead 
Lord that had revisited them. And we read how 
He allayed their not unnatural fears. "Why are 
ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your 
hearts? Handle me and see that it is I my- 
self." He displayed to them the gashes made in 
His body by the crucifixion ; He ate and drank in 
their presence. And we can see the reason for 
this. Had they been permitted to believe that 
their Master had reappeared to them as a ghost, 
that would only have confirmed their saddest 
thoughts. It would, indeed, have proved His con- 
tinued existence, but would have precluded any 
possibility of hope in His power to save and to 
bestow eternal life. 

But now he stands before them, He stands be- 
fore all men, as the Living One, the vanquisher of 
death. He has carried our whole humanity, body 
and soul, through a world of sin ; and sin has had 
no power over it. And now He has carried it 
across the gulf of death, and death has no domin- 
ion over it, has not impaired its powers or dimmed 
its light. Death has only raised it to a new power 
and transfigured it with a new glory. 

We can now understand St. Paul's passionate 



THE RESURRECTION OP CHRIST 63 

insistence upon the Resurrection of Christ as the 
centre of the Christian Gospel and the foundation 
of Christian faith. Only the Living One can give 
life; only He who conquered sin, and because He 
conquered sin conquered death also, can give to 
us the same everlasting victory. We can under- 
stand, I say, why the Resurrection of Christ was 
for primitive Christianity, the cardinal fact of 
its faith, the beginning of a new order of things 
in which God's purpose shall be at last fulfilled, 
in which good shall conquer evil, and death be no 
more than the portal through which life passes 
into life more abundant. But does it mean as 
much to us? Not in our immediate conscious- 
ness, perhaps. We who have twenty centuries of 
Christian faith and experience behind us can 
scarcely be so directly conscious as the first be- 
lievers were that our faith in the Divine mission 
of Jesus rests on the fact of the Resurrection. 
The faith and the hope which that brought into 
the world have become so familiar, so much a 
common spiritual inheritance, that we are apt to 
take them for granted. We need to remind our- 
selves that whatever of Christian faith there is 
in the world at this moment has its historical 
origin in the Resurrection of Jesus. Had there 
been no Resurrection, Christianity had never been 
born. Try for a moment to think the Resurrec- 
tion away. Suppose that Jesus had died and 
departed into the great silence, and that men had 
never known anything more about Him — the very, 



64 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

possibility of Christian faith, the founding of the 
Christian Church, the career of Christianity in 
the world, would be gone. At the utmost Jesus 
would have taken a place with Socrates or Confu- 
cius — higher, possibly, yet in the same category; 
but in all historical probability His name and 
memory would have been entirely blotted out; 
they would not have survived a single generation. 
Our special enquiry this evening, however, is as 
to the significance the Eesurrection of Christ has 
for our faith in and our knowledge of a future 
life. And in the first place it is the one positive 
and tangible proof that has ever been given of a 
life beyond the grave. I do not say that if Christ 
had not risen we should have had no belief in 
that life. We should have had, perhaps, the be- 
lief Plato had, which the Old Testament Saints 
had, which the Jews of our Lord's time had. We 
might — who knows? — have had a little more. But 
it is Christ who has brought life and immortality 
to light. What is the actual state of the case? 
Death is a fact, a certainty. Through that nar- 
row doorway every man who has ever come into 
the world has gone out again. And beyond is — 
what? A silence out of which comes no voice, a 
darkness out of which shines no ray. When 
Columbus was seeking for the New World he saw 
one day strange birds flying overhead and pieces 
of vegetation floating on the waves, which he per- 
ceived were natives not of the sea but of the land, 
and knew that he was drawing near to the end of 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 65 

his quest. But no sign ever comes to us from 
that world, no flotsam from its shores ; no message 
by any kind of wireless telegraphy greets the 
voyager's ears. Not one of those who have gone 
before us, of those we have known and loved, has 
come back to tell us what is there. But now our 
Columbus has sailed back from the New World. 
As St. Paul says, the Risen Christ is the first 
fruits of them that sleep. He is like the first ripe 
sheaf of corn, the precursor of the full ingather- 
ing. "Earth had been sown thick with graves.' ' 
Men had been but too familiar with that sowing. 
From age to age they had committed to the dust 
of death the fairest and the best they had; but 
there had been no sign of springtime or harvest. 
Christ is the first fruits of that sowing, the first 
disclosure of the wondrous secret. Death was a 
certainty, and' till Christ rose the only certainty. 

But now there is another. "Now," says the 
Apostle — and what exultation there is in that 
"now"! — "Now is Christ risen from the dead and 
become the first fruits of them that sleep." He 
is the first ripe sheaf of corn from that great sown 
field, the pledge and the pattern of all that is to 
follow. By His Resurrection Christ has invested 
what was a guess, a dream, a speculation, a long- 
ing, a venture of faith, with an altogether new 
kind of certainty. By it we are begotten again 
unto a living hope. 

Further, I ask you to observe this significance 
which our Lord Himself emphasized in the Resur- 



66 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

rection: it is the guarantee of personal identity 
after death. "Behold my hands and my feet, 
that it is I myself.' ' "It is I myself,' ' the same 
Jesus, your Master, Friend and Brother. There, 
I say, is what Christ's Eesurrection means. It is 
what it meant to those chosen followers then. 
Neither was He a weak ghost of His former self, 
as they feared; nor was He changed into some 
remote, unrecognizable, celestial potentate. All 
that He had been to their trust and their love, He 
still was. Their fellowship was unbroken. My 
brethren, that is what the Eesurrection of Christ 
means for you and me also. This I hold fast and 
will not let go: the Jesus who lives and moves 
before us in the Gospels; — it is He Himself who 
lives for us in Eternity. The Master whom 
Peter loved I may love; and I may lean on his 
breast like John. He who took the little chil- 
dren in His arms and blessed them will do the 
same for my children. He who trod the waves 
can come to my succour in the storm with his 
word of cheer. He who was the Friend of Sin- 
ners will be my friend ; and He will still pray for 
me, when I drive another nail into His Cross, that 
I may be forgiven because I know not what I do. 
And this is what resurrection means, one at 
least of the great things it means, not only for 
Jesus Christ, but for all who partake of it. 
Against all theories of impersonal or only quasi- 
personal immortality the doctrine of resurrec- 
tion stands for the persistence of individual self- 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 67 

hood. We know how selfhood still endures 
through the most remarkable changes in this life. 
Thirty or forty years ago there was a certain 
chubby-faced child, and if you were to meet that 
child on the street to-day you would pass him 
by without a glimpse of recognition. If you look 
at him in some faded photograph, it is the face 
of a stranger that meets you. Yet, though physi- 
cally, intellectually, morally, you are so different 
it is you yourself whom you see. Or one may 
meet a friend of long ago after many years, and 
1 'Yes, it is I myself," he will say. He may have 
grown fabulously rich or climbed the heights of 
fame, or he may be a needy tramp ; he may have 
undergone a vast change of character, the bright 
youth may have become the hopeless slave of vice, 
or the moral weakling a man strong in the Lord and 
in the power of His might, the greedy man may 
have become generous, the hard man tender, the 
proud man humble; but though changed almost 
out of recognition he says, "It is I myself." 
The stream has flowed through changing scenes, 
with changing volume ; its colour and many of its 
properties may have been changed by the soils 
which its current has absorbed and the tributaries 
it has received; but it is the same continuous 
stream. So shall it be in the last, greatest 
change, when the stream of life sinks out of sight 
in the Valley of the Shadow and emerges on the 
other side of the great mountains. That is why 
that change is called Resurrection. The new life 



68 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

is the old life, all that is fairest and best in 
it, in new and nobler form. That indefinable 
thing called personality, with all its peculiar char- 
acteristics, that which we know in those whom we 
really know, and love in those we really love, 
will be unchanged. When we awake one morn- 
ing on the other side we shall say, with some sur- 
prise possibly, "It is I myself," and some friend 
of old years meeting us will say, "It is I my- 
self.' ' Thus let us think of those who have left 
us ; for I am sure that we are wrong, very wrong, 
if we put them out of our hearts and out of our 
lives. Here is the perpetual link which binds 
us to them and to that second half of life, as it 
binds us to Christ, the link of resurrection. 
They are themselves, though transfigured ; all 
that was merely superficial and accidental, of the 
earth earthy, passed away, but all that makes 
them to be their very selves, remaining. In this, 
at least, Christ's Resurrection is the type and 
pattern of our own — "It is I myself." 

And the Resurrection of Christ sends out rays 
which illumine faith and hope to their widest 
circumference. It reaches back into the dawn 
of history and forward to its eternal goal. It 
signifies and guarantees the eternal victory of 
the Divine Life, of good over evil, love over hate, 
truth over falsehood. And there is no other hope 
that can bear the tremendous weight of our needs 
to-day, when out of a shattered and broken world 
we look for some new thing to emerge, some bet- 



THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 69 

ter condition, for which so fearful a price is being 
paid. The fourth year of the War slowly draws 
its clouds and shadows about our path. We 
never imagined that it would be like this. We 
knew that our cause was right; and therefore we 
trusted in God, as still we trust and shall con- 
tinue to trust. We hoped that He would make 
bare His arm and intervene on behalf of the right ; 
and He has intervened, I believe He has, again 
and again. But He has not intervened in the 
way we expected. We hoped for an intervention 
that would have saved us from vast sacrifice. 
But that has not been God's way. The servant 
must not be above his Lord. It was by the way 
of the Cross and Passion and then the Resur- 
rection that Christ came to His victory and king- 
dom ; and our hopes and prayers and efforts must 
follow in His steps, must be the hopes and prayers 
and efforts of men and women who are prepared 
to bear the burden, to tread the way of the Cross, 
to endure as seeing Him who is invisible and to 
go with Him all the way. And when for the 
time things are going none too well, and the end 
is not yet in sight, we have to steady ourselves, to 
look calmly without being staggered by the hap- 
penings of the moment. And, brethren, there is 
nothing that can so strengthen and calm us as to 
know that, come what may and come what will, 
He lives. Yes, Christ is being crucified in the 
world anew; and it is ours to take up our cross 
after Him and suffer as He did for the right. 



70 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

And after this fresh crucifixion Christ will rise 
again. He will rise again in a better world, in 
which men will take His teaching serionsly and 
try to serve God instead of Mammon, and self- 
ishness will be at a discount, and the spirit of 
service and sacrifice will spread, as it has already 
began to spread, in men's hearts. 

"We are still in the long way, and the turning 
has not yet come. But now is the time to realize 
that the help God sends us is likely to be just in 
that long way, yes, through its very lengthiness, 
by enabling us to endure to the end. He that 
shall endure to the end shall be saved. A 
Frenchman said a little time ago, "What desertion 
to the enemy is in a soldier, pessimism is in the 
civilian." But we are not going to be pessimists. 
Believing in the Risen and Reigning Christ, we 
are going to be brave men and women, and pa- 
tient and hopeful; because we know that the 
things which are ultimately bound to win are the 
things which are good as God is good. 

He hath sounded forth His trumpet that shall never call retreat; 
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat. 
O be swift my soul to answer Him, be jubilant my feet — 
Our God is marching on. 



V: THE SPIRITUAL BODY 



The Spiritual Body 

"But some men will say, How are the dead raised up? and with 
what body do they come?" — 1 Corinthians xv:35. 

Our subject this evening is one the bearing of 
which is not generally well understood; and it 
may help to clarify your ideas about it, if I tell 
you how my own have changed. 

At one time I was much perplexed regarding 
the Resurrection of Christ. I did not disbelieve 
the fact; but I failed to understand why St. Paul 
should make the whole trustworthiness of the 
Christian Gospel turn upon it, asserting so pas- 
sionately that, if Christ be not risen, our faith 
is vain and we are yet in sins. I believed, or 
thought I believed, in the immortality of the 
soul ; and I reasoned that if the soul is immortal, 
Christ of course is immortal; and if we are as- 
sured that Christ lives in the spirit, our Saviour 
and King, what, I asked myself, was the supreme 
need of His bodily resurrection? It might be 
valuable, in the circumstances even necessary, as 
an evidence of His survival after death; but how 
could it be so central for Christian faith as the 

73 



74 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

New Testament everywhere makes it? I found 
that the New Testament everywhere teaches that 
for Christ, and for ns too, the entrance to a bliss- 
ful and triumphant immortality, the fulness of 
eternal life, is only through resurrection; but I 
could not see why, until I made the important 
discovery that the immortality of the soul as a 
separate entity is not a Biblical doctrine at all. 
It is a doctrine of Greek metaphysics which has 
somehow been grafted upon Christian theology. 
What the Bible teaches is the immortality, not 
of the soul, but of the man, the human personality, 
with all that essentially belongs to it; and what 
the Bible takes for granted is that the organism 
God has created for a human "self" is not body 
or soul, but body and soul in vital union. Body 
and soul are correlative ideas; the one always 
implies the other. To think of a "soul" is to 
think of the "body" whose soul it is; and to think 
of a body is to think of the soul whose body it is : 
My body is the body of my soul, and my soul is 
the soul of my body. I am not two beings but 
one. My life is one, my death is one. The death 
which is the wages of sin is death for the whole 
man, body as well as soul. Eternal life, the gift 
of God in Jesus Christ, is life for the whole man 
— the body becomes a temple of the Holy Ghost ; 
and the final salvation is the resurrection, the 
revivifying of the whole man, soul and body unto 
the fulness of eternal life. And I venture to say 
that this Biblical doctrine is the only one that 



THE SPIRITUAL BODY 75 

provides a sufficient basis for a completely moral 
view of human life; and that it is in full agree- 
ment with the findings of modern physiology and 
psychology, revealing as they do how intimately 
mental and moral life is bound up with the bodily 
organism, how soul and body act and react upon 
one another in a hundred marvellous ways. 
Buskin goes very far, but he is probably right, 
when he says that it is impossible to have a per- 
fect soul in an imperfect body or to have a per- 
fect body without a perfect soul. 

The teaching of the New Testament on this 
subject is given in its fullest form by St. Paul in 
this chapter. Let us consider what that teach- 
ing is. 

In the first place, however, one is compelled to 
point out what it is not. The traditional idea, 
perhaps it may still be called the popular idea, 
of resurrection is that the body of the future is 
just the body of the present, the body which is 
laid in the tomb, raised up and reanimated, com- 
posed still of the same material particles. And 
that, no doubt, was the primitive theory. That 
theory is taught in some of the Jewish Apocalyp- 
tic writings and the Talmud; it was taught by 
some of the Fathers of the Church and the 
Schoolmen of the middle ages, and from them it 
has come down into the traditional beliefs of 
Christendom. But it is here explicitly set aside 
and rejected by St. Paul. "Thou Fool," he says, 
"thou sowest not that body which shall be." It 



76 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

is physically impossible. As every one knows, 
the material particles of which a human body is 
built up sooner or later return to the natural 
elements, and must in the course of ages enter 
into the composition of many human bodies. 
You cannot, indeed, attempt to imagine a resur- 
rection of that sort without plunging into depths 
of grotesque absurdity. It is so evident, too, 
that any body like the present material body 
would be wholly unfitted for the higher forms of 
life in the Heavenly World. It would be as if 
the fledged lark whose wings are ready for soar- 
ing skyward were doomed still to live within its 
shell, or the butterfly made for the sunshine and 
the flowers were still to be confined with the 
coffin of its grubhood. 

But if the body of the future is not materially 
identical with the body of the present, two ques- 
tions arise: "What is its nature? and how is it re- 
lated to the present body 1 As to its physical con- 
stitution St. Paul has nothing to say except that it 
is not of flesh and blood. Yet since it is a body, 
having form and occupying space, it seems neces- 
sary to believe that it has a material subsistence 
of some kind. Now the composition of matter 
is the great problem with which science is at 
present wrestling, and regarding which it some- 
times seems to be on the verge of great discov- 
eries. And scientists are agreed that the physi- 
cal universe is filled throughout with a material 
substance of a far subtler kind than our senses 



THE SPIRITUAL BODY 77 

have cognizance of, which they call aether. It is 
by means of aether that light travels. It abso- 
lutely permeates all the grosser forms of matter, 
so that a body composed of this aethereal sub- 
stance would pass through a stone-wall without 
resistance, and would glide through space with 
the swiftness of a sunbeam. I am not saying 
that the "spiritual" body is composed of aether. 
I am not even making the suggestion — let no one 
carry away that idea. I am only offering an 
illustration of the possibility that there may be 
a body, and, if we believe St. Paul, of the fact 
that there is a body which we can never see with 
these eyes, nor touch with these hands, nor per- 
ceive by any of our present senses. 

What powers of sensation and action it may 
have there is nothing to tell us ; but we may rea- 
sonably believe that they will far exceed those 
we now possess. We have only our five senses, 
only these five windows of the soul through which 
we can know anything of God's universe. Be- 
yond that it is to us a sealed book. We know, 
however, that the book contains pages we have 
never read. We know that there are sounds of 
such a pitch that no human ear can detect them 
but to which some of the lower animals are sensi- 
tive ; and that there are rays of light and shades 
of colour no human eye can see. It is not a pure 
guess to say that the physical universe has other 
phenomena as real as light or heat or sound, 
which are unknown to us simply because we have 



78 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

not organs of sensation corresponding to them. 
And it is scarcely a mere guess to say that our 
house which is from Heaven will have many more 
windows to it than the earthly house of this taber- 
nacle. What new beauties may not disclose them- 
selves to the poet and the artist, what undreamt 
of sciences to the thinker, what new powers to 
the man of action? 

But all that is speculation, though it is intel- 
ligent speculation. Let us follow St. Paul. All 
he attempts is to point out certain leading fea- 
tures in which our Resurrection body necessarily 
differs from the present body, and by which it is 
fitted to be the organ of a perfected human life. 

The one, he says, is "sown in corruption ,, ; the 
other is "raised in incorruption. ' ' Let us dwell 
for a minute on that word "sown." I suppose 
that, through the constant reading of this pass- 
age as part of the Burial Service, we take this 
word as referring to the literal burying of the 
body in the earth. But the Apostle's meaning, I 
feel sure, is far wider than that. We bury what 
is dead, but we sow what is living. "That which 
thou sowest is not quickened except it die." 
What St. Paul means is that the present life is 
the seedtime for the body no less than for the 
soul. The "sowing" of the body does not begin 
at death. It is finished then; but all the time 
we are here we are sowing the seed of the body 
which shall be ours forever. And it is sown in 
corruption. One of the first facts about our 



THE SPIRITUAL BODY 79 

present body is that it is corruptible. It is sub- 
ject continually to waste and decay. We die 
daily. Every movement of hand and foot, every 
beat of the heart, means waste, and it is only by 
a process of constant renewal and repair that 
the body continues in health and vigour. Hence 
the necessity of our bodily appetites. And we 
know how prolific a source of temptation these 
imperious cravings of the corruptible body are, 
how they tempt to sins of the flesh, and how all 
men, rich and poor alike, are apt to be tyrannized 
by the thought, What shall we eat? What shall 
we drink and wherewithal shall we be clothed? 
We know, too, how this tempts continually to dis- 
trust of God, and to envy, covetousness and in- 
justice towards our fellowmen. One can scarcely 
conceive what would be the emancipation of being 
delivered from all fear of want, sickness or death, 
all anxiety about a livelihood for ourselves and 
those dependent upon us, all the cares and tempta- 
tions arising from the necessities of the cor- 
ruptible body. But if now we fight the good 
fight against those temptations, this very thing 
shall be our reward. We shall be clothed again 
with a body which is incorruptible, in which 
therefore there are no clamorous, overbearing 
physical appetites, nor any of the manifold temp- 
tations of flesh and blood. That fight won here 
will never have to be fought again. Then the 
apostle says of the present body that it is sown in 
dishonour. It is what he elsewhere describes as 



80 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

this "body of our humiliation. ' ' It is of the 
earth, earthy; and its frailties, its ailments, and 
sometimes its defacement^ and deformities, are 
the cause of much suffering and humiliation. 
Many things in this world have suffered because 
of sin; but except the human soul nothing has 
suffered so terribly as the human body. We can- 
not tell what even this corruptible body might 
be, had we and our forefathers never violated 
its sanctity and impaired its beauty and weakened 
its vital powers by sin: But its day of compen- 
sation is coming. Its redemption draweth nigh. 
It will be raised in glory. 

Further, the present body is characterized by 
weakness. We cannot do what we would. La- 
bour is toilsome, even the labour we love, and 
cannot continue long without cessation. Thought 
wears out our energies; exertion exhausts our 
vigour; and in the moments when we are most 
eager to press forward the weak body cries out in 
protest "Thus far and no farther.' ' It is sown 
in weakness, but again, if we use its feeble 
powers to do the will of God, it will be raised in 
power. "If I could only go as I am now," 
Darwin said once, "If I could have my head 
sixty years old and my body twenty-five, I could 
do something." Earth cannot grant such a boon, 
but Heaven will. The body will be no longer the 
weak partner but the soul's perfect instrument; 
no longer needing to have its inertia whipped and 



THE SPIRITUAL BODY 81 

spurred into action, it will be the soul's untiring 
helpmeet. It will be raised in power. 

But the crowning distinction is that it will be 
raised a spiritual body. That which we now have 
is a natural or sensuous body. It links us with 
the lower creation rather than with the higher. 
Its pleasures and pains are those of sense. Its 
sphere is that of earthly things. It is true that 
this natural body is influenced by the spiritual 
life; but it is so only in a limited degree. Its 
health or sickness, vigour or debility, pleasure or 
pain, is determined far more by physical than 
by spiritual conditions. A violent toothache 
will hinder a good man in his work or his prayers 
as much as a criminal in his crimes, and the most 
black-hearted villain may enjoy more robust 
health than the most saintly Christian. But the 
body of the Resurrection will be a spiritual body. 
Not that it will be bereft of senses, but its form- 
ative principle will be the spirit, that element in 
our nature which is most akin to the Divine. 
Here the body is healthy or sickly, comely or un- 
comely, according to the physical vitality that 
animates it. Here great souls, like St. Paul, may 
be in bodily presence weak, while small souls may 
be clothed in superb physique; pure souls may 
dwell in diseased and corrupted frames, while 
leprous souls may inhabit spotless flesh and moral 
deformity be associated with physical charm. 
But hereafter the outward man will take the 
mould of the inward; the body will perfectly 



82 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

represent and embody the character, purity in its 
lustre, wisdom and faith in their dignity of 
stature, love in its heavenly glory. 

And now I pass to my last point, on which 
rests the practical bearing of this whole subject. 
This body of the future, which is so marvellously 
different from that of the present, is neverthe- 
less vitally related to it. It has what we call an 
organic connection with it. And this St. Paul 
illustrates by his famous analogy of the seed sown 
in the earth and the fruit or flower that springs 
from it. You plant a bulb and by-and-by you find 
a lovely and fragrant lily; an acorn, and on the 
spot there will stand a hundred years hence a 
stately oak. What can be more unlike than a 
bulb and a lily, an acorn and an oak, a grub and 
a butterfly, an egg and a bird? Apart from 
actual experience, who would deem it possible 
that the same life should assume forms so dis- 
similar? Yet Nature is one vast magazine of 
examples of this universal law. Sc, says the 
Apostle, is the resurrection from the dead, the 
transformation of the body that now is into that 
which is to come. That transformation we have 
never yet witnessed. Hereafter it may seem as 
natural as the germination of a seed ; but now — 
can the bird in the egg foresee what it is to have — 
wings and song? Can the coarse and unsightly 
bulb imagine the fragrant and ethereal flower? 
As little can we imagine what it will be for this 
corruptible to put on incorruption, for this body 



THE SPIRITUAL BODY 83 

of our humiliation to be fashioned into the like- 
ness of Christ's Glorious Body. 

We cannot imagine it as a process ; but we can 
see the practical significance of it as a fact. It 
is this, that whatever a man soweth that shall he 
also reap, and that this life is seedtime for the 
body as well as for the soul. As now we are 
sowing the seeds of the character which in its full 
development will be ours in eternity, so we are 
sowing the seeds of that body also which shall 
be its outward counterpart and yokefellow. 
Brethren, I believe that we are growing our spir- 
itual body all the time; every act of our present 
life is inexorably linked with its future. There 
are, I believe, certain plain facts of experience 
which are a prophecy, one might even say an 
earnest and a beginning of the resurrection of 
the body. We all know, or ought to know, how 
the state of the mind affects the well-being of the 
body. We know how the spirit within stamps 
itself upon the flesh, and especially on the coun- 
tenance. Have you never caught a glimpse of 
the spiritual body even here! Have you never 
seen faces, the face perhaps of a grey-haired, 
wrinkled old man or woman, or of a pallid inva- 
lid, made beautiful by the beautiful life behind it? 
Have you never seen faces that shine with good- 
ness, faces made pure by purity of heart? Have 
you never seen the strength and nobility which 
sit upon the countenance when heroic resolve and 
high endeavour fill the soul; the dignity and 



84 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

beauty which patient suffering gives; or how 
when some strong tide of the spirit is sweeping 
through a man's being, it alters the fashion of 
his countenance, and seems to dilate his very 
form and figure and make the weakest as an angel 
of God? These are familiar facts, and they are 
of far-reaching significance. They show the 
moulding power of spirit over matter. They are 
a prophecy, and so far as they go, a beginning of 
the final transfiguration by which the image of 
the earthly shall be changed into the image of 
the heavenly. The resurrection of the body be- 
gins in us now as truly as the regeneration of the 
soul. They are parts of the same Divine re- 
demptive process. Life is a unity here and here- 
after, and we know not in what mysterious ways we 
are preparing for ourselves, or rather in our- 
selves, the body as well as the soul that shall be 
ours hereafter. 

I ask you to think seriously of this : — a spiritual 
body, a body which completely corresponds to 
your spirit and character. Think what would be 
seen in this world, if it were so now. If blind- 
ness of soul, if uncleanness of heart, if the fevers 
of passion, and the swelling tumors of vanity, and 
the cancers of hate, produced their counterparts 
in the outward man, how many now seen in health 
and comeliness would assume forms from which 
the eye would turn with instinctive loathing. 
And the splendid transformations we should be- 
hold! What dignity of stature, what athletio 



.THE SPIRITUAL BODY 85 

vigour and grace, would many a weak and puny- 
form suddenly acquire! How should the lame 
leap as an hart, and the deaf hear, and the stam- 
mering tongue be endowed with moving eloquence ! 
How many wasted with sickness and pain, how 
many enfeebled and withered with age-, would 
find new life and vigour coursing through their 
veins, a new lustre glowing in their countenance ! 
It shall be so. The body shall be as the spirit is. 
And both shall be what our faith in Christ or our 
no-faith, what our thoughts, words and deeds, 
whether inspired by the Spirit of Christ or by 
the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the 
pride of life, are now making them. Christ be- 
gins with what is inmost. Human reformers be- 
gin with the outside of things, the body, the house, 
the material environment. Christ first carries 
purity and health to the heart, and works outward 
to the body and its surroundings. But these 
will be reached in due time. Is Christ making 
our hearts like His own? Then He will by-and- 
by make our bodies like His own. Is He renew- 
ing our spirit now? Then soon He will make all 
things new. 



VI: JUDGMENT TO COME 



VI 

Judgment to Come 

"It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judg- 
ment. ' ' — Hebrews ix : 27. 

"We must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of 
Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, 
according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad." — 2 
Corinthians v:10. 

It is appointed unto men once to die. Our 
term of life is brief; and in a few years we shall 
be of the innumerable forgotten dead. We form 
each of us but a drop in the ocean of this world's 
life. "What lasting importance can attach to our 
conduct, to the use we make of these fleeting 
years, which are as "the wind that passeth and 
that cometh not again"? The answer to such 
questions is, "After death the judgment." Hu- 
man life and destiny are not a little thing; their 
lines are too vast and complex to meet in this 
world; they converge only to a point beyond it. 
There, not here, not in the grave but before the 
judgment-seat of God, the drama of human his- 
tory is brought to its close. 

In the New Testament this is described in the 
language of apocalyptic symbolism. It is pic- 

89 



90 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

tured as the Grand Assize. There is the vision 
of a Great White Throne, before which are 
gathered all nations, the millions of millions who 
have lived upon the earth, all standing on a com- 
mon level before the presence of One who sees 
through the whole life and character of every in- 
dividual soul; and we read of books that are 
opened and of men being judged according to 
what is recorded therein. All this is plainly a 
symbolic clothing of spiritual realities with the 
familiar forms and proceedings of earthly courts 
of justice. It is a sublime picture which we must 
endeavour to interpret. 

To think of Judgment as only an event of the 
future, to regard it only as a single crisis, is to 
take a superficial view. Christ's judgment seat 
is always set up in this world. If there has ever 
been in human history a day of judgment, that 
in which we are now living is such a day. Christ 
is bringing many hidden realities and unrealities 
to light. He is judging Christendom, shewing up 
the paganism that was overlaid with only a thin 
veneer of Christianity. He is bringing out the 
latent evil that was in the world, a subterranean 
fire that has only erupted and broken loose in the 
war. He is bringing out, too, the good much of 
which lay dormant, the faith, the loyalty and 
heroism, the power of self-sacrifice to the utter- 
most. And He is judging us as a nation, trying 
us in these anxious days as silver is tried, to 
prove whether we have the fortitude and courage 



JUDGMENT TO COME 91 

which only rise with danger, the resolution which 
is only hardened by difficulty, the qualities of 
soul that will fit us to be His chosen weapon 
against the forces of iniquity. Christ's judg- 
ment seat is always here. It is largely true, 
though by no means wholly true, that the "his- 
tory of the world is the judgment of the world. ' ' 
It is true also that the judgment seat is set up 
in every man's life. Everything we do carries 
with it its own retribution. Whether it be good 
or bad, life is its own judgment. It records it- 
self upon itself. The thief, the liar, the sluggard, 
the hero, the philanthropist, the saint, he who 
sows to the flesh and he who sows to the spirit, 
each finds the reward of what he has done in 
what he is. You, young men, have written the 
first chapter of your lives, and what you now are 
at the end of that chapter is God's judgment 
upon it. And you who have written the second or 
the third chapter — God's verdict upon these is that 
they have made you what you are. There needs 
no recording angel; life is its own recorder. 
There needs no Book of Judgment written in 
Heaven; you yourself are that book. The char- 
acters in which it is written may be illegible, at 
best they are but faintly legible, to our dull eyes ; 
but could we read them as God reads them we 
should see that the solemnities of Eternity enfold 
us as closely now as ever they will do, that life 
squares accounts with us between the rising and 
setting sun. And we must be made to see it, 



92 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

must have our eyes opened to see what we are, 4 
and how we have become what we are, and why. 
We must be made manifest before the judgment 
seat of Christ. 

The New Testament represents this as the in- 
evitable sequel of death. And why this must 
be is evident. At death the first great stage of 
existence is ended. It cannot then be altered. 
And if this first stage of existence is to have any 
moral value, if at any rate it is to have its full 
moral value, for what comes after, it must be re- 
viewed and seen in the one true light, the light 
of Christ. On the threshold of that other life all 
self -ignorance and self-deception must end. We 
must be made manifest before the judgment seat 
of Christ. There the last mask of pretence will 
be torn from the face of hypocrisy, and all up- 
rightness will be openly vindicated. Yet it is 
not with the judgment of others we can be prin- 
cipally concerned hereafter any more than here. 
In that light which shines from the face of Christ 
we shall first of all and chiefly be revealed our- 
selves to ourselves. 

St. Paul emphasizes this result, but upon the 
process by which it is to be brought about he 
sheds no clear light. It is plain, however, that 
the judgment of God can become a reality only 
through self-judgment, that is through memory 
and conscience, although by what means the ac- 
tion of these faculties will be stimulated we do 
not know and need not try to conjecture. 



JUDGMENT TO COMB 93 

There must be the awakening of Memory. 
Memory, we know, is capable of strange awaken- 
ings. We seem to forget vastly more than we 
remember; ninety-nine per cent, of the objects 
that pass across the field of mental vision van- 
ish into oblivion and seem to leave no trace. Yet 
we know how the memory of long-forgotten ex- 
periences may be suddenly startled into life. We 
know that in certain states of the mind not only 
single facts but a whole region of forgotten 
knowledge may emerge in memory. All that we 
know of the working of memory points to the 
conclusion that we forget nothing in the sense of 
not being able at some time to recall it or have 
it recalled to us. As the islets that stud the 
bosom of the ocean are the mountain-peaks of 
submerged continents, so our conscious recollec- 
tions are only the outstanding heights of a buried 
past. There is no word we have spoken, no 
event we have taken part in, no impression we 
have ever received, but has left its imprint on the 
tablets of Memory; and it needs only the proper 
vivifying touch to make these faded records of 
the soul glow again into distinctness. And we 
may well believe that it shall be so hereafter. 
We speak of a recording angel; but the true re- 
cording angel is Memory. The finger of God 
will touch these indestructible records of the soul 
and they will live again. The things we have 
done in the body will come back to us, the good 
thought and the evil thought, the secret prayer, 



94 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

the secret curse, the hidden deed of love or selfish- 
ness, the temptation bravely withstood or weakly 
yielded to, the kind word, the cruel word, the op- 
portunity seized, and the opportunity lost. Let 
us not suppose that we have seen the last of any- 
thing; let us not live on that supposition. So far 
as is necessary to God's ends we shall see it all 
again. 

And we shall see so much in a new light. Judg- 
ment implies not only a great awakening of Mem- 
ory but a great enlightening and quickening of 
Conscience. "We must all be made manifest be- 
fore the judgment seat of Christ." What does 
that mean? What is it to stand before the judg^ 
ment seat of Christ, not figuratively but really and 
spiritually? It means this at any rate, that 
Christ will be the sole standard for our judgment 
of ourselves and our actions, our standard of 
judgment for all things. We shall judge our- 
selves and everything else by the test of likeness 
or unlikeness to Christ. That is the one real 
test, you know ; and to that all things must in the 
end come. Before Christ — that is the one place 
where all can meet on common ground. The 
scholar and the ploughboy, the philosopher and 
the child, the prince and the pauper, all can meet 
spiritually before the cross of Christ here and 
must meet before the judgment seat of Christ 
hereafter. This, surely, is the essence of judg- 
ment to come — all persons and all things seen, 
measured and appraised according to their rela : 



JUDGMENT TO COME 95 

tion to Christ, seen in the light of eternal truth, 
seen as Christ sees them. Judgment is the mind 
of Christ manifested to us and in us. Here we 
live where a hundred cross lights play upon us, 
in the world with its worldly maxims and stand- 
ards, its little tribunals of fashion and conven- 
tion and opinion; but there we are carried up 
into the one true Light and are made manifest in 
it. Think of it! Here is a man whose only en- 
quiry about any action or any plan of his has 
been, "will it be profitable 1 ' ' or "will it be popu- 
lar V J or "will it be agreeable and comfortable ? ' ' 
who has*hever once all his long life asked him- 
self, "will it be right! " And there he finds him- 
self where that is the only question about every- 
thing; and in that light he sees himself as he is. 
I do not think that anything else will be needed, 
that any dramatic act of judgment will be neces- 
sary. The soul will see itself and judge itself. 
And here is another man who, while he is in 
the world, is earnestly striving to live by a higher 
law, who does not determine his course by asking 
whether this or that will be profitable or popular 
or pleasant, but with all his stumblings and fail- 
ings still lives by faith in Christ, still tries to 
measure things by the standard of Christ and to 
walk by His light — think what it will be for that 
man when death sweeps all other presences away 
and sets him with his character and his past life 
in the presence of Him he has loved and tried to 
follow! .Will that be terrible? Perhaps it would 



96 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

if Christ allowed it to be, if He made tlie light 
to shine only or chiefly on our imperfections and 
inconsistencies. But He will not. Conscience 
will doubtless be quickened in regard to all that 
needs to be rebuked and purged away; but these 
are not the main things in the soul that, has set its 
trust on Christ and made Him its ideal. That 
soul, too, will be made manifest before the judg- 
ment seat of Christ; manifested in the glory and 
strength of what it has really lived by and lived 
for. You do not know, Christian, how glorious 
your faith, the weakness of which you often la- 
ment, will appear in that light. You cannot 
imagine the recognition your lowly, imperfect 
service will receive. One of the marvels of judg- 
ment which Christ always emphasized is the 
manifestation of the great principle in the com- 
monplace act. Interpreted by Him the "cup of 
cold water" becomes a royal gift; what you do 
to "one of the least of these " a rich offering unto 
God. Go on then, not letting your right hand 
know what your left hand doeth. Never be cheer- 
less|; never grow weary in welldoing. It will 
all bear fruit and its fruit will be manifested 
before the judgment seat of Christ, never fully 
manifested until then. 

We bear the burden and the heat 
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done; 
Not till the hours of light return 
All we have built do we discern. 



JUDGMENT TO COME 97 

Manifestation, then, is the first element in 
judgment. We must all be made manifest before 
the judgment seat of Christ. Let us look next at 
the second element, Award : ' ' That every one may 
receive the things done in the body, according to 
what he hath done, whether it be good or bad." 
" The things done." Mark the emphasis on this. 
The pith and marrow of the Christian religion is 
that we are not saved by ' ' things done. ' ' We are 
saved by Christ. Christ is the centre of the 
Spiritual Universe and our position there is de- 
termined by our relation to Him. But side by 
side with this truth the New Testament, and 
every writer in the New Testament, declares and 
reiterates this other truth, so that we may never 
forget it, thai though we are not saved, we are 
judged by the u things done." There will be no 
rehearsing of creeds, no investigations of our 
orthodoxy, at the judgment seat of Christ. The 
things done will be the only query and the only 
test. The principles in the deep chambers of the 
heart by which men have chosen their path, their 
faith and hope and aspirations, the inner spirit 
of their lives, will have their evidence in the actual 
moral product. The tree is known by its fruits; 
the appeal is to conduct. 

Yet it is never said that God will judge our 
works, but always that He will judge men ac- 
cording to their works. And it is one thing to 
pronounce judgment upon a man's works, and 



98 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

quite another to judge the man according to his 
works. Even we can do the one; the other we 
dare not. To judge an action is usually a simple 
matter. Without any hesitation we approve the 
conduct of the Good Samaritan and condemn 
that of the Priest and the Levite. Empanel any 
jury you please and you will get a unanimous ver- 
dict. The one action is good, the other bad. 
But to judge men, to measure responsibility and 
desert and nicely apportion praise or blame, is 
beyond us. For this we should need the power 
to view another's conduct not from without but 
from within ; to put ourselves not only in his cir- 
cumstances but, so to say, inside his skin, to think 
his thoughts, and feel the pressure of his tempta- 
tions as he feels them. 

Then at the balance let's be mute, 
We never can adjust it. 
What's done we partly may compute, 
But never what's resisted. 

Human judgment at its best is a rough and 
tentative aiming at justice. The judge on the 
bench who sentences the felon in the dock knows 
that if all men had their absolute deserts, there 
are a multitude of persons who would exchange 
places with the condemned criminal. The judg- 
ment of Him in whom we live and move and have 
our being will modify or reverse many a human 
judgment. 



JUDGMENT TO COME 99 

There the tears of earth are dried; 
There the hidden things are clear, 
There the work of life is tried 
By a juster judge than here. 

The surprise of the final verdict is one of the 
thoughts on which the teaching of Jesus often 
dwells. "Many that are last shall be first, and 
the first last." 

It is appointed unto all men once to die, but 
after this the judgment. It must be so. When 
we have completed this first probationary stage 
of existence, it must be seen what place we are 
fitted for in the next. Yes, that, I feel convinced, 
is the right way to think of Divine judgment. It 
is not so much giving us what we deserve, as it 
is giving us what we are fit for, what we have 
fitted ourselves to be and to do. The servant 
who has doubled his talents is promoted to be 
lord over many things, because in the smaller 
sphere he has fitted himself for the larger. We 
have our place and our career of opportunity in 
this world, and as we occupy these we are fitting 
ourselves for a place and a career in the eternal 
world. If you ask what then Christ does for us, 
I reply that He does everything. He does not 
abrogate or alter the law that as a man soweth 
so shall he reap ; but He makes it a law unto sal- 
vation. He gives you the right seed to sow, and 
the right soil to sow it in, and the possibility of 
sowing it unto life eternal. Sow the seed Christ 
gives you, sow unto the spirit not to the flesh; 



100 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

take Christ into your hearts by faith and love 
and sow Christ in your lives by the work of faith 
and the labour of love, then at that day He will 
give you the harvest of all your sowing, multi- 
plied with a Divine increase. 

After death the judgment. It must be so. 
Shall I startle you if I say that it must be so for 
our very salvation? How should we be fitted 
to enter into the perfect life of the purified until 
we have been searched and tried and made mani- 
fest in the full light of Christ! It is sometimes 
believed and taught that Christians will be ex- 
empt from judgment; but such a doctrine is not 
to be found within the boards of the New Testa- 
ment. The truth is we could not afford to be 
exempt; nor sincerely loving and seeking the 
best could we desire to be exempt. Were we to 
begin the life to come without this we should 
necessarily carry over into that life the self- 
ignorance, the errors, prejudices and inconsis- 
tencies that cling to us until the day of our death. 
Though we have built upon the One Foundation, 
we have built upon it not only gold, silver and 
costly stones, but too much else of baser ma- 
terial. And we cannot carry our wood, hay and 
stubble into that other life. Thank God for 
that! We cannot desire to carry on that kind 
of building there. It is a welcome thought that 
all spurious and inferior elements will be, as it 
were, burned out of our character by the judg- 
ment of Christ. It may be an experience not 



JUDGMENT TO COME 101 

without pain; but is not this our prayer and our 
heart's desire? — "whether by water or by fire, oh 
make me clean.' ' Dear brethren, if that is our 
desire, the judgment of Christ will be only the 
crowning mercy, the finishing stroke of our re- 
demption, the last cleansing, fitting us for the 
fellowship of the pure in heart and opening the 
gates of heavenly life. 

To sum up, judgment to come means the ver- 
dict of Christ upon every man and upon every 
man's character and life; it means that verdict 
brought home to every man, and taking effect in 
the assigning to every man of his own place in 
the eternal world. To those who have listened 
to Christ's voice here, who have committed them- 
selves to Him and His service, and have made 
it their ambition to be well pleasing unto Him, 
that verdict will be one of loving acquittal, nay, 
of joyous welcome, and in so far as it is one of 
censure it will bring with it the last word of par- 
don they can ever need. There are those for 
whom, doubtless, its efficacy will have to be 
realized through some severer process. And if 
there are those who have so sinned against the 
light that they have killed conscience and put out 
the eyes of the soul, so lost that they are incap- 
able of knowing and obeying the truth — if there 
are such, I confe&s that I do not see how the* 
Divine verdict is ever to be brought home to 
them, and I do not know what God will make of 



102 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

them. It would seem that even Hell could not 
do them any good. 

The only resource, the paramount duty, is to 
anticipate that day, to put ourselves before the 
judgment seat of Christ now while from His 
judgment seat we can always turn again to His 
cross, to come with an honest and good heart 
into the light of Christ now, confessing our sins 
and walking in the light even as He is in the 
light. That is the only refuge. I came upon a 
golden sentence in Plato last week, one worthy of 
the Bible itself: " There is no way of escape for 
an evil man except to become good." How deep, 
how true that is ! evil man, there is no refuge, 
no escape for you, but to become good. No 
other. You may search the world and heaven 
and hell, but there is no outlet for you save 
that. The hounds of God will pursue you 
remorselessly until you take that way. You 
must surrender to that necessity. You must 
consent to become' good, a new creature; and 
you were best to do it now. But Plato could not 
tell the evil man how to become good, to obtain 
deliverance from his evil past and his evil self. 
Christ not only tells you this, He gives the de- 
liverance. His pierced Hand holds out your 
pardon; take it. The light of His Face will 
shew you the way of life ; walk in it. The power 
of His Spirit will strengthen you to win the vic- 
tory ; trust in it, put it to the proof. To all this 
is my message — Let us come in deep sincerity to 



JUDGMENT TO COME 103 

Him who is both Saviour and Judge, confessing 
the sins we know, asking Him to search us and 
see if there be any wicked way in us, casting on 
Him the full burden of our soul's needs; and so 
begin and continue the life which we know is 
eternal life, the life in which Christ will recognize 
the fruit of His own. Then, though sun and 
moon go out in darkness, His Face will be our 
Everlasting Light. 



VII: THE HEAVENLY WORLD 



VII 

The Heavenly World 

"A better country, that is an heavenly." — Hebrews xi:16. 

The story is told that when Henry the Fourth 
of France once asked the Duke of Alva his opinion 
about some of the astronomical mysteries of the 
heavens, the Duke replied, "Sire, I am too much 
occupied on earth to have leisure to think of 
heaven.' ' And, as applied not to the visible but 
to the invisible heavens, the words exactly ex- 
press the opinion and practice of many. "We 
preach much less, and think much less, about 
Heaven than our fathers did, or than the Chris- 
tians of New Testament times did: but I do not 
know that we are entitled to claim superiority on 
that account. It is true that a great deal of talk 
about Heaven may be merely sentimental indul- 
gence, an anodyne to induce lethargic content with 
a present whose evils cry aloud to be grappled 
with and overcome; but as a source of spiritual 
energy, as a motive to courageous action and pa- 
tient enduramce, I do not believe that we can afford 
to neglect the hope set before us, any more than 
could the saints of earlier times. If we believe 

107 



108 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

in that life beyond the veil and look forward to 
it as the state to which we are going, we ought to 
think about it, and indeed we must think about 
it. And it is not only the prospect for ourselves 
that bids us think of it. If that state is mean- 
while future to us, it is not future but present to 
the vast multitude of human beings who have lived 
on earth. There is scarcely one of us, except the 
very young, who have not much of their heart's 
best treasure laid up there. Parents, brothers, 
sisters or children, friends and companions of 
our journey, are there. We went with them to 
the furthest verge of life; but they have passed 
from our sight and from our call. They are not 
here, they are there; and how can we but think 
sometimes of how it is with them there, how they 
are spending the long moments of Eternity? 

"He that hath found some fledged birds' nest may know, 
At first sight, if the bird be flown; 
But what fair well or grove he sings in now, 
That is to him unknown. 

And yet as Angels in some brighter dreams 

Call to the soul, when man doth sleep, 
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, 

And into glory peep." 

My subject this evening is the Heavenly World. 
Do not expect, however, that I am going to at- 
tempt a picture or description of that world. The 
more detailed and concrete such descriptions 
are the more certain are they to be merely and 



THE HEAVENLY WORLD 109 

crudely fanciful. Eye hath not seen; ear hath 
not heard. The speech even of the New Testament 
on such a subject is necessarily that of symbolic 
imagery. We can have no safe guide to our 
thoughts except the great certitudes of Christian 
faith and such inferences as Christian experi- 
ence may enable us to draw from them. 

In an earlier sermon of this series I dwelt upon 
the fact that the life of immortality is life in a 
bodily form : and from this it follows that Heaven 
is a place. However true it is that Heaven in its 
essence is a spiritual state and that " 'tis Heaven 
must come, not we must go," still as the perfect 
life has its perfect organism in the Spiritual 
Body, it must also have its perfect environment 
in an external sphere of being which, like that 
body, corresponds to the inward character. And 
this is the uniform presupposition in the New 
Testament. With that certainty, however, our 
knowledge ends. When we say that Heaven is 
a place, we must remember that the word 
1 'place" may denote something of which our ex- 
perience does not enable us to form any concep- 
tion. We know space only of the three dimen- 
sions, length, breadth and height, and we can con- 
ceive no other. But it does not follow that 
there are no others. If we lived in a universe 
where lines were the only magnitudes, we should 
be unable to conceive of breadth : in a universe of 
surfaces only we should be unable to conceive of 
depth. So it is perfectly possible that space may 



110 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

have other dimensions than the three that are 
known to us, and that such questions about 
heaven as whether it is up or down, near or far, 
are really meaningless. The most reasonable 
supposition is that the Heavenly World is sep- 
arated and hidden from us only by some property 
of space of which we are ignorant. 

Heaven is somewhere and the somewhere may 
be here as much as it is anywhere. The New 
Testament speaks of it as "that within the veil"; 
and the phrase, though it is used in a different 
line of thought, is a suggestive one. It was only 
a veil which in the Jewish Temple separated the 
Holy of Holies from the outer courts. So may 
it be in the great Temple of the universe. It 
is not vast distance but only a veil, the thinnest 
of partitions, that separates us from the Heaven- 
ly World. If I have any belief on the subject 
it is that that world is here though unseen, sun- 
dered from us only by the limitations of our own 
nature, the veil of flesh and blood, by which we 
are as effectually debarred from all sense-con- 
tact with it as by immeasurable space. 

And since we are totally unable to perceive this 
world behind the veil with any senses we possess, 
it follows that we are equally unable to imagine 
it in any kind of physical concreteness. We can 
think of it only in a general way as the perfect 
environment for the perfect life : and this even the 
New Testament can help us to do only by means 
of negatives. What in effect it bids us to do is 



THE HEAVENLY WORLD 111 

to think of everything in this present world that 
imposes imperfection and limitation upon the 
life of man, and then be assured that in the 
Heavenly World no such thing is to be found. 

In one great comprehensive negation which in- 
cludes all others, it is said that there shall be 
11 no curse any more" (Rev. xxii:3). But is there 
anything in this present world, you may say, 
which, except sin and apart from sin, can be called 
a curse? Do not all things work together for 
good to them that love God? Yes, but to say that 
they work for good is not to say that they are in 
themselves good. Take pain for an instance. 
Pain may be a discipline of highest value. We 
know indeed that a life without suffering would 
not be good for any human being. We need our 
cross. But pain simply as pain, suffering as 
such, is undeniably a curse. In the Heavenly 
World there shall be no more pain. Take War: 
how much poorer the history of man would be 
without the heroisms and magnanimities, the acts 
of splendid self-devotion called forth in war. 
Yet war in itself is a curse, and the clear Chris- 
tian duty is to work for its restriction and its 
ultimate abolition. Heaven is a world of peace. 
Take labour: we know that the perpetual con- 
flict with nature to which man is committed, the 
necessity of winning her gifts by incessant toil, 
vigilance and ingenuity, has been the making of 
him; but that is not to say that stern exhausting 
toil is not in itself a curse. Who could look for- 



112 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

ward to an eternity of it withont dismay? The 
Heavenly World exacts no such tribute. There 
they rest from their labours. We can see that 
God has placed us here in a world and under 
conditions which are adapted to our imperfect 
moral development. A world without pain, con- 
flict, toil, sorrow, death, would be for us the worst 
of worlds ; it would stupefy, brutalize and destroy 
us forever. But though the imperfect life needs 
such an environment, this is not God's final pro- 
gramme for humanity. As human character im- 
proves and becomes more Christlike, the out- 
ward conditions of life even in this world will 
doubtless be vastly changed for the better. Dis- 
ease and pain will be in a large measure pre- 
vented or mitigated. The story of our race will 
no longer be written in war and blood. Human 
toil will be abated of its severity, and poverty of 
its wretchedness. Humanity is groping its way 
to some more equitable and gracious social sys- 
tem than that which is based on a naked antag- 
onism of interests, with all its wasteful struggle. 
A better time will come even here. One cannot 
tell how like the Kingdom of Heaven this world 
may become. Yet earth never can be Heaven. 
That is certain. Never can we hope that human- 
ity will here be delivered from temptation, weari- 
ness, sorrow and pain, from all the limitations 
and imperfections which are inherent in the pres- 
ent constitution of things. For this, the Bible 
tells us, a new heaven and a new earth are needed, 



THE HEAVENLY WORLD 113 

a new order of nature. And it tells us, too, that 
such a world does exist, where, the discipline of 
earth having done its work, it remains only to 
bring forth its fruit unto everlasting perfection. 
That Heavenly World, God's ideal order of na- 
ture, already exists (though not in its final com- 
pleteness) ; and into that world, as everything 
in the New Testament teaches us to believe, the 
redeemed, purified and perfected by the vision 
and judgment of Christ, enter when they pass 
within the veil. 

In the same book of Eevelation, two striking 
and comprehensive symbols are used in the same 
negative fashion to describe the physical perfec- 
tions of the inheritance of the saints. The first 
is that in the apocalyptist's vision of it "there 
was no more sea/' That does not appeal to us 
who go down to the sea in ships and do business 
in great waters. The sea forms the roads and 
bridges of our island Empire. Our poets and 
artists find never-ending charm in its changing 
moods and haunting mysteries. But the Jew was 
not a sailor. All through the Bible you will find 
that the sea is a symbol of evil significance, a 
symbol of perpetual unrest and unfruitful strife 
— "The wicked is like the troubled sea which can- 
not rest"; a symbol of swelling pride and menac- 
ing rage and high sounding fury — "The floods, 
Lord, have lifted up, the floods have lifted up 
their voice. The Lord on high is mightier than 
the voice of many waters, yea, than the mighty 



114 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

waves of the sea." So must we understand the 
saying, " there was no more sea." The Heaven- 
ly World is one of perfect harmony. Nature has 
ceased in any of its operations to be antagonistic 
to man. Here life is a voyage over a turbulent 
sea. Changing, often adverse, circumstances 
come rolling after each other like the unnumbered 
billows. We surmount one only to find another 
following in its wake. We have our calms, too, 
but infrequent and of short duration. In the 
throng of our cares and the bustle of our lives 
we look forward to a time when we shall have 
overtaken the demands upon us and be, for a 
little while at least, free from pressure; but the 
hope oftenest proves illusory. There is for the 
most part the incessant call to keep the ship's head 
against the sea, "ever climbing up the climbing 
wave. ' ' Such is our life here. But there the toil- 
worn voyager shall be done with "the weary oar, 
the weary wandering fields of barren foam." He 
shall drop anchor in his desired haven and go 
up into the City which hath foundations. "And 
there was no more sea." No more conflict with 
adverse circumstance, with the severities of na- 
ture. The drought that scorches, the flood and 
the hurricane that devastate, the pestilence that 
walks in darkness, the catastrophe in commerce 
or the dire bereavement in the home that in an 
hour engulfs the gains of arduous years or the 
joy of a life, as a richly laden vessel founders in 
the deep — these have no counterpart yonder, 



THE HEAVENLY WORLD 115 

"They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any 
more, neither doth the sun light on them nor any 
heat. ' ' There the peace of God that rules the heart 
rules the elements also; and nature reflects in 
unsullied brightness the love and wisdom of the 
Father of Lights. No more strife with nature, 
and no more strife with evil. Here mighty waves 
of opposition lift themselves up against God's 
will and purpose. Always we seem to face the 
onrush of some deluge — in one age of boastful, 
loud-voiced unbelief, in another of luxury, self- 
indulgence and sensuality, in another of sheer ir- 
religion and spiritual deadness. Always there 
is that sea of evil, restless, heaving, threatening, 
striving to break in and undermine and over- 
whelm. And God permits this ; for it is our very 
life to strive against odds, to fight the good fight 
of faith. But in that better world there is no 
more this surrounding sea of evil, no jarring will, 
no discordant note. We pray that God's will 
may be done on earth as it is done in Heaven. 
There is one will in Heaven. The noisy waves of 
strife have died forever away. The Heavenly 
World is the world of Divine peace. Nature and 
spirit are at one. ' ' There shall be no more sea. ' ' 
The Heavenly World is also a world of light. 
1 ' There shall be no night there. " "The City had 
no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine 
in it ; for the glory of God did lighten it, and the 
Lamb is the light thereof." Is this language to 
be taken in any literal sense or is it purely figura- 



116 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

tive? Is this celestial light to be conceived as 
spiritual or as physical? As both, I think. Just 
as in the Spiritual Body, so in the whole consti- 
tution of the Heavenly Universe, the natural and 
spiritual are interfused in a way which, of course, 
we are unable to comprehend. In the New Test- 
ament Heaven is always thought of as a world 
of transcendent light and glory. And it is so 
we must think of it, if we are to think of it at 
all. Light, benign and unfading, is at least the 
symbol of the atmosphere in which its life con- 
tinually moves. 

' ' There shall be no night there. ' ' Think of some 
of the implications of that fact. Here we must 
work while it is day, because the night cometh 
when no man can work. For we need the pres- 
sure and the call of opportunity, fleeting and irre- 
deemable, the ever present sense that the night 
cometh, to make us work while it is day. A 
temporal state, in which the present is every mo- 
ment becoming the past, and what is left undone 
becomes for ever impossible, is alone suited to our 
imperfect character. But there is no night, no 
time-limit, in God's perfect world. It is to me 
one of its most unimaginable features, that it is 
timeless. In the perfected life we shall have 
such eagerness of delight in the service appointed 
us that we shall no more need the reminder of 
the westering sun or the passing hour to hasten 
our steps. Life shall be without haste arising 
from any external compulsions. It seems to me 



THE HEAVENLY WORLD 117 

almost the last and highest mark of our future 
perfection that we shall be fit to be set free from 
this last of our taskmasters, opportunity. 

Here, again, if we have diligently laboured 
through the hours of light, the day is often long 
enough, and night comes none too soon. Blessed 
night that follows the day of toil! shadow of 
God's merciful hand, hushing His wearied children 
to sleep. It brings release from the yoke to man 
and beast. It sets the servant free from his mas- 
ter. It brings oblivion of care and sorrow and 
stills for a little every throbbing heart. But there 
shall be no need of night there. Try to think 
what that implies; to have always the freshness 
of the morning, never to grow weary in any oc- 
cupation, to have the interest in it always unflag- 
ging, and the strength for it, and the enjoyment 
of it, the pulse of life always strong and bound- 
ing. Such is the prize set before us, if we work 
the works of God according to our day and the 
strength appointed for the day. 

No night of sorrow and weeping shall be there, 
no night of death. Night is a pall which covers 
from view much of the tragedy of life. It grants 
the boon of privacy to grief. The solitude of the 
midnight hour claims the tribute of tears from 
many who, with aching hearts, bravely face the 
world. If the story of one night's dying and one 
night's sorrowing could be placed on canvas, it 
would be a picture man could not endure to look 
upon. But though weeping endure for a night, 



118 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

joy cometh in the morning. In the Heavenly 
World there shall be no night; for " there shall be 
no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither 
shall there be any more pain, for the former 
things have passed away." 

Such in faint and misty outline is the world be- 
hind the veil, the world into which as the Fore- 
runner Christ has gone, and into which have fol- 
lowed Him generation after generation of those 
who have walked by faith, into which, as the 
years pass, many dear ones whom we have loved 
and love still have found an entrance. Do we be- 
lieve in it? Do we really believe? Surely if any 
man firmly believed that he had a chance, even a 
bare chance, of winning an inheritance so entirely 
incalculable, what would he not be ready to do or 
suffer, what effort would he not sustain, what sacri- 
fice would he not willingly make in order to give 
himself the full benefit of that chance? There are 
four classes into which men divide themselves 
by their attitude towards the hope of Heaven. 
There are those to whom it makes no appeal, who 
are so lapped about with this world's good things 
that they do not desire or care to think of an- 
other. For such an one, "tame in earth's pad- 
dock for its prize," we must wish that, if noth- 
ing else will serve, God will send some thunder- 
bolt to cleave his earthly paradise in twain and 
deliver his soul alive from its suffocating en- 
closure. And there are those in whom it does 
not kindle any ray of belief, who are not very 



THE. HEAVENLY WORLD 119 

happy or contented in this world, but hope for 
nothing beyond it, who just set their teeth to 
plod along and grind through, knowing that the 
weariest river reaches at length the sea. If any 
of you belong to that class, all that I have said 
has seemed but an idle tale, and you question if 
I myself believe it. Well, I do believe it, because 
I believe in God and Christ; and I could not be- 
lieve in the God revealed by Jesus Christ, if I 
believed that this world and this life represent 
completely and finally our relation to the Power, 
whatever it be, to which we owe our existence. 
May God send the light of His love into your 
soul that you may see also the glory of the great 
hope ! And there are those in whom the thought 
of the Heavenly World awakens no disbelief but 
scarcely as yet any desire or hope. It is thus 
with many who truly love Christ, with, I suppose, 
most young Christians. It is true that the very 
young, if we may judge by their favourite hymns, 
think much about Heaven; it makes a vivid ap- 
peal to the imagination of the child. But that is 
usually a passing phase; and in the experience 
of young Christians the hope of the heavenly 
inheritance is not as a rule strongly influential. 
But it will become so. More and more their look- 
ing unto Jesus, as they run the race set before 
them, will lead their eyes to rest in hope upon 
the Land that is beyond the flood of time. Of 
such is the fourth class ; those in whom, amid the 
conflict and the labour and the losses of the world, 



120 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

Christ lives not only as the Master of the life that 
now is but more and more as the Hope also of 
the better life to come. Happiest of all are yon 
to whom such words apply. For that is a hope 
that maketh not ashamed, an anchor to the sonl 
both sure and steadfast, a hope that grows the 
stronger as others weaken and decay, the hope 
whose progress is " Jesus in Heaven, Jesus in the 
heart, Heaven in the heart, the heart in Heaven. ' ' 
Perhaps nothing in ordinary human experience 
does so much towards this as the experience of 
bereavement. As faith and love, memory and 
hope, follow loved ones within the veil, they give 
a new reality to the unseen world. While they 
were with us their presence ministered to an 
earthly love; now they beckon us onward to a 
better country, that is, an heavenly; they invite 
us to set Christ and His Heaven before us as our 
aim, until for us, too, the day come, as come it 
will, when our warfare shall be accomplished. 

Jesus in mercy bring us 
To that dear land of rest, 
Who art with God the Father 
And Spirit ever blest. 



VIII: THE HEAVENLY LIFE 



VIII 

The Heavenly Life 

"And his servants shall serve him. And they shall see his face 
and his name shall be on their foreheads." — Revelation xxii:3, 4. 

Lsr the last sermon of this series I endeavoured 
to bring into view the glimpses which the New 
Testament offers lis of the Heavenly World. A 
still higher theme now claims our thought — the 
Heavenly Life. There must be conditions of that 
life by which it stands in complete contrast to 
life as we know it and which in our present state 
we cannot hope to comprehend. For example, 
its everlastingness. When we try to contemplate 
eternity we can thing of it only from our ex- 
perience of time, yet we know that from the con- 
ception of time we can never reach the concep- 
tion of eternity. To comprehend a life which is 
not transient yet is not stationary, in which there 
is movement and fulness of activity, is not pos- 
sible under our present limitations. But no such 
metaphysical problems are raised by the ideas 
of the Heavenly Life which are prominent in the 
New Testament. These are all derived from 
Christian experience, both by similarity and by 

123 



124 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

contrast. They point forward to a life which is 
the same and yet not the same as life is now, in 
which there is nothing essentially new, but in 
which every element of experience is heightened 
and perfected, filled unto all the fulness of God. 
And that Divine fulness will be as little subject to 
any law of uniformity there as here. There may 
be wide diversity in the conceptions we form of 
the perfect life and none the less truth may be 
in them all. To the imagination of childhood it 
may be simply the " happy land, far, far away"; 
to the aspirations of youth the ideal of all truth, 
beauty and goodness; to the activities of man- 
hood the higher and wider area for the exercise 
of the powers that have been trained and proved 
in the narrower sphere of earthly service; to the 
toil-worn workman, to many a weary soul, Heaven 
is first of all rest, the rest that remaineth. And 
the Heavenly Life will be all these, and all that 
every sanctified nature can crave for its fullest 
satisfaction. There are many abiding-places in 
the Father's house. We are made to glorify God 
and to enjoy Him in many ways. 

But there are certain central and essential fea- 
tures of that life as it is revealed to us. Let us 
think about these. And first there are the cor- 
relative ideas of Service and Rest. Heaven is 
rest. And what is sweeter than rest? When 
the task to which one has braced his energies is 
finished and wearied frame and strained nerve 
are bathed in repose, there is no sensation of 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 125 

more unalloyed satisfaction nature can furnish. 
And it is a touching confession of what life is, of 
the weight of the burden and the severity of the 
struggle, that the dream of the future which has 
the deepest fascination for a multitude of minds 
is that which represents it as repose, rest from 
all the toil and moil, the tangle and the trou- 
ble. How many tired people there are in this 
world, dragging themselves through the day's 
work, glad, glad when it is finished, glad too to 
think sometimes that soon, not too soon for their 
wishes, the long fatiguing day will be past and 
the long rest begin. So single and absorbing 
does this craving sometimes become that it kills 
out all desire for life hereafter. On Huxley's 
tomb are engraved the words: "God giveth his 
beloved sleep ; and if an endless sleep he wills 'tis 
best." And James Thomson, the poet of pes- 
simism, celebrates "the restful rapture of the 
inviolate grave." These are transparently false 
thoughts. They are self -contradictory. Extinc- 
tion is not rapture. It is no more rest than it 
is activity. Nothing is not something. Still I 
suppose that some of us can understand the feel- 
ing of that very tired woman who said that she 
would not wish to go to Heaven at once, but would 
like just to be laid up in lavender for a thousand 
years beforehand. And it may be that the many 
mansions will contain such resting-places for 
weary souls. But ought we not rather to believe 
that all the rest of that temporary kind we need 



126 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

may come to us as we die into that other life? 
We take our nightly sleep and rise, as we say, 
rested; the exhausted lamp of life has been re- 
plenished. And when God gives His beloved 
sleep we may be sure that they awake rested, re- 
created for a fuller life on a brighter, happier 
morrow. But this kind of rest is not the rest of 
the Heavenly Life. That is Eternal rest, an es- 
sential and constant element in the life of perfect 
service. The highest idea of rest is not sleep, 
idleness or inactivity of any sort; it is fulness 
of power in happy exercise, life abundant, in- 
flowing and outflowing. The spiritual nature 
cannot be refreshed in any other way. Were one 
to cease to think the intellect instead of becoming 
brighter would rust; and unexercised affections 
instead of receiving fresh elasticity would stiffen 
into apathy. There is rest in health, in the flow 
of joyful strength; there is rest to the desiring 
faculties in finding the thing desired; there is 
rest in the delight of congenial employment. So 
it is said of the Blessed that they "rest from their 
labours, ' 7 and that they ' ' rest not day nor night. ' y 
A great deal of cheap ridicule has been cast upon 
the Christian conception of Heaven, as if it meant 
lifelong, eternal holiday. No, there is no slug- 
gard's paradise there; there are no sluggards 
there. There His servants shall serve Him; 
serve Him as they have done here, and also as 
they have never done here. Here their service 
is often in itself trivial, irksome, monotonous 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 127 

drudgery. In what higher, more congenial tasks 
they serve there, when the rough apprentice-work 
of earth is done, in what various employments the 
faculties that have been polished and brought to 
a keen edge here shall there be used, we know not. 
But we know that 

What here is faithfully begun 
Shall be completed, not undone. 

To suppose that the service of the Heavenly 
life is confined to the range of what we technical- 
ly call " religious' ' is to take a quite unwarrant- 
able view. There will be places, pursuits, occu- 
pations and enjoyments and interests far more 
diversified, powers and possibilities and scenes 
of life far more various than here. What new 
extensions of knowledge and action may enrich 
that greater life! What new beauties may dis- 
close themselves to the eye of the artist, to the 
ear of the musician, the imagination of the poet! 
What new powers to the man of action! One of 
our Scottish writers tells of a student who, dying 
of consumption, kept working at his Greek and 
Hebrew, sure, as he said, that he would be the 
better fitted for the service of Heaven. It is a 
thought full of comfort regarding those who are, 
as it seems, prematurely snatched away from the 
service of earth. That service does not end; it 
goes on ; it will find in that greater world its fit- 
ting sphere; it will bring forth its ripest fruits 
under that brighter sun. There His servants 



128 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

serve Him, each in his own fashion; and what- 
ever the service, in it they find eternal rest. All 
is as natural and necessary as it is for the sun 
to shine, or for the flowers of spring to give forth 
their fragrance. It would be labour and impris- 
onment for them not to serve. We can form no 
truer conception of the " Saints' Best" than this, 
that His servants serve Him, because their choice 
has become their ever-blessed necessity. 

But our text brings us next to the very centre 
of the Heavenly Life, its vision: "His servants 
shall serve Him, and they shall see His Face." 
So it is written elsewhere, "We shall see Him as 
He is"; and it is our Lord's own prayer; 
"Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast 
given me be with me where I am, that they may 
behold my glory." These words are a great 
deep, into which we can but reverently gaze, 
which we cannot fathom. What is this vision of 
Christ? Of necessity it is first of all and essen- 
tially spiritual. The glory of Christ is a glory 
of spirit, and must be spiritually discerned. It 
is not a glory of robe or crown or throne, but 
the glory of infinite goodness, of love beyond 
measure, purity and truth without stain. And 
we behold in Him that glory now. Yet how im- 
perfectly! How much more of the splendour of 
goodness there must be in Christ than our clear- 
est insight is able to take in. Think how it was 
when He walked this earth. Some passed Him, 
by; never looked at Him; saw nothing in Him 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 129 

to look at. Some just looked at Him, and sneered, 
and went their way. Some looked and hated. 
And some there were who, though their vision 
was dull and feeble, did see in Him a glory which 
drew them to Him, and received some print of 
His soul upon their own. And when, as was ex- 
pedient, He was taken away from them as a 
bodily presence and came to them again in 
spiritual presence, their eyes were further opened 
and His glory dawned on their souls with new 
radiance and power. They saw that the light of 
His Face was the glory of God. And we, too, 
if our eyes have been enlightened, behold in Him 
that Glory. We not only see in Him what ex- 
cels all the glories of the world, we see that the 
love which is in Christ is the most glorious thing 
in God, the Divinest in the Divine. And if we are 
living in the light of it, we behold this more and 
more. The nearer we approach to Christ in 
character the more glorious do we see Him to be. 
And yet, I say, how imperfect and intermittent 
is our vision of Him. Christ is rather our star 
than our sun ; the polestar to which we look from 
time to time in order to take our bearings rather 
than the sun that floods all our earth and sky 
with its beams. But in the Heavenly life Christ 
is the sun, not the star. "The Lamb is the light 
thereof." Think what that means. Everything 
is seen in its relation to Christ, in the light of His 
mind and will, and in that light alone. Here also 
we see in the light of Christ; in some degree we 



130 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

see ourselves and our deeds and character, and 
other men with their deeds and character, in the 
light of Christ. But here a hundred competing 
lights play upon us to dazzle and confuse. We 
are tempted to measure persons and their 
achievements and qualities by the false and defec- 
tive standards of the world, are tempted to pay 
homage to wealth, cleverness, power, success. 
But there the light of Christ, like the sun when it 
rises, extinguishes every false or artificial glare, 
shines upon every path, penetrates character to 
its most secret depths, reveals every object as it 
truly is. 

Here we walk by faith only, not seeing our goal, 
not seeing our Guide, taking all on trust. We 
can but believe the truth, grasping it with the 
conviction of our souls and clinging to it despite 
all specious lies. But there faith will be justi- 
fied by sight. Here we take the path of duty, 
even when it is stern and forbidding, simply 
trusting for the Master's approval. There we 
shall see the smile on His face. Here we firmly 
believe that the humblest person who faithfully 
fights the good fight and uses his small talent in 
a narrow sphere lives a far greater life than the 
man whose gifts fill the largest space in the 
world's eye but whose end and aim are self. We 
hold it true; but we hold it true against appear- 
ances. There there will be no conflict between 
appearance and reality. All false seemings will 
vanish in that life which moves and has its being 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 131 

in eternal light. Here we are like the blind man 
of Bethsaida who, when Christ touched his eyes, 
saw "men as trees walking." But He will lay 
His hands upon us a second time, and the cure 
will be complete; we shall see "all things clear- 
ly.' ' 

For in the Heavenly Life the vision of Christ 
is not spiritual only. In some celestial fashion 
it is corporeal also. There faith and sense are 
at one ; for inward and outward are at one. Body 
is the perfect counterpart of spirit. Life has at- 
tained its consummate unity. In the glorified 
body, the perfect organ of the soul, we shall see 
His Face. The true shall behold Him who is the 
Truth. We cannot comprehend how this shall 
be. Heaven would not be heaven, if we could 
now comprehend it. Here we can see the im- 
press of God's hand upon His works; we can 
partly see His footprints in the track of His Prov- 
idence; best of all, we can read His heart in the 
life and death of Jesus Christ. But we cannot 
see His Face. That is reserved for the lumi- 
nous side of death. As Plato saw, wonderfully 
anticipating St. Paul, we are now like men stand- 
ing in the mouth of a wide cavern with their 
backs towards the light, seeing only the shadows 
and reflections cast by the objects that move to 
and fro in the sunshine behind them. But there 
we shall be turned from the shadows and reflec- 
tions to the light itself, and shall see face to face. 

Then follows the last, grandest feature of the 



132 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

Heavenly Life: perfected vision results in per- 
fect likeness. "His name shall be on their fore- 
heads." "We shall be like Him because we shall 
see Him as He is." Again this assimilation to 
Christ is, of course, essentially spiritual; but not 
spiritual only. The body, too, shall be fashioned 
into the likeness of His glorious body. We have 
seen that even here the soul is to some extent the 
fashioner of the body; and that the very idea of 
the spiritual body is its perfect correspondence 
to the inward life. Here beauty is, as we say, 
skin-deep; there it is soul-deep. The soul made 
beautiful by beholding Christ makes the body 
beautiful as itself. For 

" Every spirit as it is more pure 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it a fairer body doth procure 
To habit in. 

For of the soul the body form doth take, 
For soul is form and doth the body ina^e." 

It is of the character, therefore, we must pri- 
marily think when it is said that "we shall be like 
Him. ' ' " The souls of believers are at their death 
made perfect in holiness" — so says our Catechism. 
It is an astounding thought — that we should be 
made perfect in holiness, filled in every capacity 
of our being with the Spirit of Christ, absolute 
goodness, perfect love. ' ' The souls of believers are 
at their death made perfect in holiness." Why? 
Because the process is already begun in them here ; 
because the image of God's Son is already present 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 133 

in every soul that trusts and loves Jesus Christ — 
there in embryo, so to say, but there in reality, in 
organic completeness. "The souls of believers 
are at their death made perfect in holiness.' ' 
How? Because their bodies have died? No, be- 
cause they see Christ. Look at a rosebud. Hid- 
den away in its hard, green casket there are bril- 
liant hues and sweetest fragrance. Though no 
one could imagine so by looking at it, all is al- 
ready there that ever will be there; and what is 
needed to make the bud the paragon of loveliness 
it is destined to become is that it should see the 
sun. And that is all the children of God need — 
to see the Sun of Righteousness. All that is with- 
in them will answer to His call. Every half -de- 
veloped lineament of holy character will gleam 
forth in the light of His countenance; the whole 
Christ-image in them come forth vivid and glor- 
ious in every feature. It will be a wonder to our- 
selves. Christian, you do not know how glorious 
your faith will appear in the sunshine of Heaven. 
The cross uncomplainingly borne, the work pa- 
tiently carried on for weary years without a cheer 
from the world, the temptation trampled under- 
foot — these look small things; but in the day of 
manifestation — a multitude of lowly souls will 
learn with wonder of the greatness and the hero- 
ism in things that once looked so commonplace. 
"His name shall be on their foreheads." 

My brethren, that Heavenly World and that 
Heavenly Life are realities. They exist ; and how 



134 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

great an influence the thought of them ought to be ! 
How it ought to take the sting out of death, and 
what strength it ought to put into life! What 
thanksgiving and solemn joy it ought to inspire for 
those who have already attained that immortality ! 
There is a beautiful legend which tells that on the 
night the angels came to Bethlehem one shepherd 
was detained at home tending a sick guest. The 
other shepherds saw the heavenly host, heard their 
song, and beheld their glory, while all the night 
Shemuel sat alone by the restless sufferer. His 
fellow-shepherds pitied him because he had missed 
what they had seen and heard ; but in his patient 
service he had found blessing and reward of his 
own. He had missed the splendour of the angels, 
and in serving he gave up his life ; for the fever- 
poison touched him and he died. But he had 
tasted the joy of sacrifice, and his eyes saw a 
greater glory than that of angels. 

"He died and saw the Uncreated, 
AU his fellows lived and waited.' ' 

Thanks be to God for all who have tasted that 
joy of sacrifice and attained to that vision. We 
live and wait. They see the Uncreated. Theirs 
is the better lot, yet what heart and hope ought to 
be ours, whose warfare is not yet accomplished, 
who have to fight on. The things that are seen 
are temporal. I thank God for that. Often in 
these tragic days, I thank God because the things 
that are seen are temporal. But the things that 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 135 

are not seen are eternal. Thank God for that, too ! 
And our present light affliction worketh out for 
us a far more exceeding, even an eternal weight 
of glory, while we look not at the things that are 
seen, but at the things that are not seen. Breth- 
ren, bring Christ and His Heaven into your lives 
more and more. While you voyage over these 
dark waters let your anchor be cast within the 
veil. Even while you fight on in this stern day 
of battle, be patient and steadfast, and lift up your 
heads because your redemption draweth nigh. 
We are saved by hope, and above all hope by 
Christ in us, the Hope of Glory. 

Christ Jesus bring us of His Grace, 
Beyond all prayers our hope can pray, 
One day to see Him face to face, 
One day. 



IX: THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 



IX 

The Heavenly Society 

"Ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living 
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, 
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are en- 
rolled in heaven . . . and to the spirits of just men made per- 
fect. ' '— Hebrews xii : 23, 24. 

In the New Testament picture of heaven there 
is one face only which shines out in a clear light, 
the face of Christ. If we are asked where Heaven 
is and what it is, we can answer that it is where 
Christ is, and it is what Christ is. Yet the rest 
of the picture is not left in such depth of shadow 
as to convey no distinct message. As we look we 
begin to see, rising out of the background, the 
outlines of a glorious Divine Society. Every- 
where the New Testament speaks of Heaven in 
terms of social life and intercourse. Most fre- 
quently, as here in my text, its chosen symbol is 
the City — the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the 
living God. In the Bible, human life begins in 
the garden and under the simplest of social condi- 
tions, a man and a woman living their dual life as 
one. It ends in the city, the most highly developed 
form of the social organism, in which men have 

139 



140 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

the largest number of joint interests and can use 
the most complex cooperation for a common end. 
Let us think, then, of this heavenly society, taking 
this sentence from the Epistle to the Hebrews as 
our guide. 

First, it speaks of angels, innumerable hosts of 
angels. We do not know much, nor do we think 
much, about the angels. But there are angels. 
Even if the Bible did not speak of them, we might 
be fairly certain that the Human Eace is only a 
fraction, perhaps only a minute fraction, of the 
great family of God. There are in the Heavenly 
World other sons of God, whose experience has 
been widely different from ours, who have never 
worn the garment of flesh and blood, and have 
never fallen from their love and obedience. What 
shall be most gladdening and stimulating in inter- 
course with these elder sons of the Divine family, 
what we may learn from them who have never 
sinned, and what they may learn from us who have 
sinned and been redeemed, we cannot well con- 
ceive ; but it opens up a vista of possibilities, won- 
derful though indefinable, that in the City of God 
we come to innumerable hosts of angels. 

There is a second company in this great society, 
the general assembly and church of the firstborn 
whose names are enrolled in heaven, and the 
spirits of just men made perfect. I do not take 
time to expound these words minutely. By the 
" church of the firstborn' ' is meant the Christian 
Church; and by the " spirits of just men" the 



THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 141 

saints of Old Testament times now at last made 
perfect by the death and resurrection of Christ. 
And again what an illimitable thought is here ! — 
that great multitude, which no man can number, 
of those who from the beginning until now have 
been passing in ceaseless procession, and as the 
ages come and go will still be passing, through the 
valley of the shadow to brighter regions beyond. 
It were idle — utterly so — to speculate as to the 
mode or measure in which mutual intercourse may 
be realized among all the inhabitants of that spa- 
cious realm. Still it is not only justifiable but 
right to think of the noble company which, if 
Christ bring us thither, we shall find there — many 
whom it would have done us so much good to 
know as they were here, and whom it will do us 
so much more good to know as they are there, all 
the best and purest of our race, the saintly char- 
acters, the high spiritual intelligences, patriarchs, 
prophets, apostles, martyrs, some whose story has 
reached us through dim tradition, some whose 
writings have inspired us to nobler lives and 
whom we have sometimes wished we could have 
known in the flesh. It is easy of course to give 
fancy a free rein in such a region, to picture a 
Milton reciting nobler poems than Paradise Lost 
to an audience "fit" and no longer "few," or to 
imagine oneself taking courage to question St. 
Paul about some passages in his Epistles that are 
hard to be understood. But just one thing we 
may be sure of, that there no member of Christ's 



142 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

Body lacks any perfection, any real help or satis- 
faction, that can be ministered to him by the gift 
of any other member. No mere barriers of time 
or space can there limit the fellowship of those 
who are one in heart ; nor, what is more important, 
any of those moral barriers which so often hinder 
its perfection here, no obstructing prejudice, no 
antipathy, jealousy, or self willed impediment to 
the commerce of mind and heart. 

Think of the Christian Church as it is here and 
as it will be there. No sectarian names or badges 
or feelings in the General Assembly and Church 
of the firstborn; no imposed conformity, and as 
little any rampant nonconformity, no erecting of 
separate communions upon a scrap of ritual, 
polity or doctrinal formulation. They shall see 
eye to eye when the Lord bringeth again Zion. 

Think of ourselves. How little we know of 
each other here ! How seldom are we seen at our 
best in our intercourse. How seldom do we shew 
ourselves, and how seldom do we see others, in 
the most favourable light.— 

We are spirits clad in veils, 
Man by Man was never seen; 
All our deep communion fails 
To remove the shadowy screen. 

But there the good are always at their best ; and 
the words in which St. John describes the children 
of God here will there have perfect fulfilment; 
walking in the light as He is in the light, we shall 
have fellowship one with another. 



THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 143 

So are we taught that in the Heavenly Kingdom 
God at last organizes the perfect social state, 
whose only law is love because love is all its life. 
There is no blessedness conceivable beyond this — 
a society of persons all united in perfect goodwill, 
where each communicates himself to all and all 
to each, where each seeks the joy and good of all, 
and each enjoys the joy and is enriched by the 
good of all. Such a society would be the summum 
bonum, the perfect organism of the perfect life, 
the Body of Christ. And such is the society the 
Spirit of Christ has begun to fashion and is slowly 
building up on Earth, and which is perfected in 
the fellowship of Heaven. 

But when we speak of the Heavenly Society 
there is a hope that comes closer to our hearts 
than the sublime expectation of coming to in- 
numerable hosts of angels or even to the spirits 
of just man made perfect. These we have never 
seen and have never lost. But there are those who 
have left, or will some day leave, desolate places 
in our own lives, who, though lost to sight, never 
pass out of our love and our heart's memory here. 
Meet the good and best of all ages ! A far more 
poignant question to most hearts is, shall we meet 
again hereafter those we have loved best and who 
have best loved us ? See the Apostle Paul ! There 
is many a mother who in her heart of hearts knows 
that she would a hundred times rather see the lit- 
tle one taken from her arms ; many a man would 
a hundred times rather clasp again the wife of his 



144 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

youth than converse with the angel Gabriel. Are 
these longings and expectations fond and vain? 
Or are they in the light of the Gospel of God's 
Love solid and trustworthy f Will death, the pass- 
ing to another realm of existence, make an end of 
our present personal relationships and create for 
us another and entirely new range and kind of as- 
sociations, or will it immortalize and perfect all 
that is perfectible and capable of perpetuation in 
the loves and friendships of earth? In answer to 
these questions let us consider what certainties 
we have to go upon. 

The first is that flesh and blood cannot inherit 
the Kingdom of God, and that no relationships 
which are constituted merely by ties of flesh and 
blood or by secular association can be immortal. 
Even here such ties and associations may outlive 
their significance. Reunion is a second union, 
which implies a first; and we are not united, in 
any way to which the word "eternal" can be ap- 
plied, by consanguinity. Union is not achieved 
by the name of relative. There is no reason why, 
and no means by which, relationships which 
are merely or mainly physical or conventional, 
whether of parent and child, brother and sister, 
or husband and wife, should be perpetuated in 
the Heavenly "World, any more than those of 
merchant and customer, or master and servant. 
There, we may well suppose, the ideal counterpart 
of every right human relationship exists ; but cer- 



THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 145 

tainly not the reproduction of it as it exists on 
earth. 

But when lives have become truly part of one 
another, and spirit has been knit to spirit in the 
communion of eternal life; where between hus- 
band and wife there has been the " marriage of 
true minds ;" when a man has found the friend 
"that sticketh closer than a brother"; when as 
comrades in arms men have fought and suffered 
and prayed together in the cause of honour and 
righteousness, what shall we say? That these re- 
lationships have fulfilled their purposes on earth, 
and will find no place, because they would have 
no significance, in the society of Heaven; that we 
shall have altogether outgrown them and left them 
behind? Well, even concerning this some great 
Christian teachers have doubted. But the com- 
mon Christian heart has always recoiled, and will 
always recoil, from the doubt. Who could then 
say, "0 Death, where is thy sting? Grave, 
where is thy Victory?" The bereavements of 
death would still contain, even for the Christian 
believer, the hopeless sorrow of an eternal part- 
ing, and the sad inscription over the pagan tomb, 
"vale, vale, in ceternum vale," might still serve to 
utter the despair of our hearts. If we believe that 
God is Love, can we also believe that? 

It may be said, however, that this feeling that 
the pain of separation can be solaced only by the 
hope of reunion, natural as it is, is groundless: 
that a perfect life hereafter is quite thinkable 



146 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

without such reunion, and that indeed such con- 
tinuation of the present into the future might, for 
aught we know, be a limitation and an impediment 
to the perfect life instead of a feature of its per- 
fection. Well, I do not say that God could not 
give us a Heaven, and a perfect Heaven, without 
restoring to us all that has been fairest and best 
in our earthly life; but I say that the only way 
by which He could do so would be by making a 
complete severance between that life and this, by 
virtually making us altogether different beings, 
and giving us a life that should be, not the con- 
summation of the life begun here, but simply an 
additional state of existence. Emphatically this 
is not the Christian idea of immortality. We do 
not carry into the life hereafter merely a char- 
acter, a moral record and a destiny, existing in 
the consciousness of God; we carry thither our 
personal identity and our own consciousness of it. 
That is to say that one indispensable bond which 
links the self hereafter to the self here is memory. 
It is memory that guarantees our self -identity 
throughout the earthly life: it is because we re- 
member that we know our past selves to be our 
present selves, the same however different. And 
so it must be in the hereafter. Much as we are 
ignorant of concerning the life within the veil, 
the survival of memory must be held as certain. 
Without that there could be really no future 
state : it would be the same as if we were anni- 



THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 147 

hilated and a new race of beings created in our 
stead. Without that we could not even know our- 
selves to be the sinners Christ has redeemed, nor 
give to Him the praise. But if we carry memory 
with us, we must carry with us our affections and 
an inextinguishable longing for those whom we 
have bound to our souls by the chains of love, an 
unappeasable need of them for our completest 
bliss. And if it be said that this is not the ques- 
tion I maintain that it is the question, the very 
question. If we believe the Christian Gospel, that 
God is Love and that it is the necessity of His 
nature to do for His children all that love can 
do, and that Heaven just means that at last He is 
able to do this to the full, without let or hindrance, 
we may be sure that Heaven will not falsify this 
precious hope. Heaven may have nobler fellow- 
ships than the reunion of friends long parted ; but 
there it is not as in this imperfect state, where 
the greater good has often to be purchased at the 
cost of the less. There at last all things are ours. 
It is true that there is no express teaching in 
the New Testament to this effect; only, however, 
because it is everywhere taken for granted. 
Think, for example, of the words our Lord speaks 
to His disciples in the hour of farewell. "Let not 
your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also 
in me. In my Father's house are many abiding- 
places. I go to prepare a place for you, that 
where I am there you may be also." How could 



148 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

such words suggest to those brokenhearted men 
that one by one the bonds which knit them to- 
gether in truest brotherhood would be forever dis- 
solved, or how could they convey any other 
thought than that in the Father's house, after all 
earthly wanderings and separations, they should 
at last meet again, He and they together for ever ! 
Or take St. Paul's tender words of consolation to 
the Thessalonians : "I would not have you igno- 
rant concerning those which have fallen asleep, 
that ye sorrow not even as those who have no 
hope. For, if we believe that Jesus died and rose 
again, even them also which sleep in Jesus will 
God bring with Him. ' ' These Thessalonians were 
expecting the coming of the Lord very soon and 
when some of their number died before that ex- 
pected advent, they were sorely perplexed. They 
feared that they might never see their departed 
friends again. And the Apostle repeats to them 
the Master's assurance: Let not your hearts be 
troubled. They shall see them again, and that 
in the presence of their glorified Saviour. 
"Wherefore," he says, "comfort one another 
with these words." And what congregation is 
there in which there is not need of this comfort? 
One needs it to-day, another to-morrow. The 
Unseen is constantly opening its gates to receive 
those we love; but though they pass out of reach 
and out of sight, it is not for ever. As Browning's 
Pompilia says, 



THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 149 

Lover of my life, soldier-saint, 

No work begun shall ever pause for death. 

Love will be helpful to me more and more 

I' the coming course, the new path I must tread. 

It is true of course that there are some things 
connected with the resumption of our relation- 
ships in the Heavenly Society which we cannot 
know and regarding which we can scarcely form 
even a conjecture. We leave this life at all stages 
of it; how does it proceed there? How do those 
who have departed in the last decrepitude of age 
become young again? How do the little children 
grow up in the nurseries of Heaven? You re- 
member the fond lament of Constance over her 
boy foully done to death — 

When I shall meet him in the courts of Heaven 

1 shall not know him; therefore never, never 
Shall I behold my pretty Arthur more. 

But we may be well content to leave such things, 
the time and the place and the manner of our 
meeting again with the All-wise. If he has in- 
spired in our hearts undying affections, it is be- 
cause we ourselves are undying, and because love 
is safe in His keeping, safe in that Father's house 
to which He bids us lift our eyes. 

Some day, but not yet, 
Somewhere, but not here, 
God shall by thee set 
Joys from each past year. 



150 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

Light shall on the mountains 
Clear shine after rain, 
And the long-dried fountains 
Well up fresh again. 

All things true and tende 1 * 
Shall thine eyes behold, 
In the new light's splendour 
Fairer than of old. 

And thy soul forget 
Grief, remorse and fear — 
Some day, but not yet, 
Somewhere, but not here. 

Let not your hearts be troubled. "We shall not 
need, like Joseph and Mary seeking the Child 
Jesus, to go wandering up and down the streets 
of that Jerusalem to seek our own among its 
6 solemn troops and sweet societies.' If we do 
not know where to find them, they will know where 
to find us. ' ' Are they not waiting for our coming, 
waiting to receive us into the eternal habitations ? 
But observe that our text says, not that we shall 
come, but that we are already come to this 
Heavenly Society, to Mount Zion and its Divine 
fellowship. Already we belong to it and breathe 
its atmosphere. There are not two families of 
God's children. As Charles Wesley writes in the 
sublime st of his hymns, 

One family, we dwell in Him, 
One Church, above, beneath, 
Though now divided by the stream, 
The narrow stream of death, 



THE HEAVENLY SOCIETY 151 

One Army of the Living God, 

To His command we bow; 

Part of His host hath crossed the flood, 

And part is crossing now. 

There is a world of inspiration for ns in these 
thoughts. "One family, above, beneath' ' — then 
we must live as members of that family ; we must 
learn not only to speak its language but to live 
by its spirit. "Part of His host hath crossed the 
flood." Yet they were once on this side, mortals 
and sinners like ourselves. But they trusted in 
God ; they fought the good fight and laid hold of 
eternal life; they washed their robes and made 
them white in the blood of the Lamb. Why should 
not we? "One army of the living God." They 
were weak as we, but strengthened from on high 
they came off more than conquerors. Why should 
not we ? When we are weary and ready to be dis- 
couraged in the long campaign, let us listen to the 
shouts of victory which come from the other side 
of the stream, and be strong in the Lord and in the 
power of His might. One day our warfare too 
shall be accomplished. 

Some of you have more closely personal ties 
with the society of Heaven. Let it be the secret 
manna of your hearts, that while you find life 
sometimes solitary and hard, and stumble on in 
your lonely way, you can give thanks that your be- 
loved have reached the goal, and that God has 
wiped away all tears from their eyes, 



152 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

And in these closing hours of another year are 
there not voices that speak to each of us out of 
the Eternal World? Let us listen to them, as 
they remind us that it is Christ alone who gives 
eternal meaning to this brief, swiftly-passing life ; 
as they bid and entreat us, now, if never before, to 
set eternal life before us as our goal and Christ 
before us as our way, to be heart and soul with 
Christ and with all who are trying to live and 
work for Christ; so that we may be at last with 
Him where He is, and with them where they are. 
And after all, as somebody has said, "Upstairs 
and downstairs are not so far apart.' ' No, not 
so far apart, if only we are climbing. 



X: IS EVIL ETERNAL? 



Is Evil Eternal! 



"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first 
and the last. " — Eevelation xxii:13. 



The question I wish to consider is this : Is evil 
destined to be eternal, or is there a final unity 
of all things in Christ? Existence, as we know 
it, is not a unity. It is cut in twain by a moral 
cleavage deep as the foundations of the universe, 
the antagonism between good and evil. And it is 
of the essence of the Christian faith that this an- 
tagonism is real. Moral evil is not good in the 
making. It is sin, that which absolutely ought 
not to be. But it is also of the essence of the 
Christian faith that existence began in unity. 
There are religions which carry back the tragic 
schism into eternity, which are founded on the 
belief that there is an original, self-existent prin- 
ciple of evil as well as of good. But Christianity 
entirely repudiates this explanation of the mystery 
of evil. "In the beginning God" — "Of Him and 
through Him and unto Him are all things. ' ' Far 
as it has travelled and diverse as are the channels 
into which it has streamed, all existence has issued 

155 



156 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

from the Eternal Fountain, God. The question 
I put before you is : Will it return again to unity? 
As all the rivers come originally from the ocean 
and again flow into it, will all existence which has 
had its source in God, in like manner return to 
Him as its final goal? Or are good and evil des- 
tined to divide eternity as they now divide time? 
That is the question I am putting before you. I 
know very well that the Bible does not clearly 
answer it, and that neither you nor I can dog- 
matically answer it ; but to consider it will, I hope, 
set some matters of very practical importance in 
a clearer light. 

In the first place it is certain that evil does not 
terminate with the present life. " There may be 
Heaven, there must be Hell, ' ' says Eobert Brown- 
ing; and though the "may be" falls short of the 
truth, the "must be" does not go beyond it. 
There must be heaven, because the spirit that 
makes heaven is here on earth. And the spirit 
that makes hell is here also. The law of God 
in this and all worlds, a law absolutely just and 
absolutely inevitable, is that whatsoever a man 
sows, he reaps. If a man sows evil, the harvest 
is more evil. The supreme penalty of sin is more 
sin. We see how this fell sowing and reaping go 
on in this life. We see how sin puts out the eyes 
of the soul, destroys conscience, petrifies feeling, 
extirpates the capacity for pure and noble de- 
lights ; tears out the very stops from the organ of 
man's moral nature. Do a wrong deed, and 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 157 

though you flee on the wings of the wind, you can- 
not escape the penalty. For it is in yourself ; the 
reward of the deed is in what you have become. 
And if we see this sowing and reaping in process 
here, we know that it must continue hereafter. 
The Christian conception of the future life has as 
its essence this, that it is the continuation and final 
completion and fruition of the life men live now. 
Death, the transition from this present state with 
its material conditions and limitations, will pro- 
duce many changes in us which we cannot compre- 
hend or even picture in imagination; but one 
thing it cannot do, make men radically different 
from their former selves, or change the direction 
in which their lives have been travelling. We 
have been studying the teaching of the New Testa- 
ment as to what the " great change" will effect on 
one side of character. It will make the good man 
better; it will bring out vividly all the good that 
is in him, and set him free from all checks and 
hindrances, from all clinging imperfections and 
inconsistencies; it will make him wholly and for 
ever what he has longed and prayed and striven 
to be. And if it does this for the good man, what 
shall it do for the evil man but conduct him also 
to his goal? We know too little of the secrets of 
the future to be able to say what that goal is; 
but over the portals of eternity this is the inscrip- 
tion written : ' i He that is unrighteous, let him do 
unrighteousness still ; and he that is filthy, let him 
be made filthy still: and he that is righteous, let 



158 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

him do righteousness still ; and he that is holy, let 
him be made holy still. ' ' 

Moral continuity, you see — that is what makes 
both heaven and hell. Goodness ruling at last 
with absolute unrivalled sovereignty, that is 
heaven. Evil ruling with unlimited despotism 
and unbroken sway, that is what we mean, or 
ought to mean, by hell. And it is an appalling 
thought that here may be sown the seed which 
bears its natural fruit in such a state. 

But there are other reapings also from this sow- 
ing. From sin one does not only reap more sin; 
it is the everlasting ordinance that he shall reap 
misery also, that misery which is the inescapable 
result of the violation of the laws of his own being. 
If a man commits a sin, God does not hurl him 
over a precipice or fling him into a fiery furnace ; 
He leaves him to the natural consequences of his 
own act. If his sin is of the body, if he is a 
drunkard or an opium-eater, it will make his 
nerves an engine of torture and reduce his mind 
to imbecility. And if the body is thus avenged, 
shall not the soul with its finer sensibilities be 
avenged sevenfold? Let no man doubt the fact 
of such retribution, a fact which is written so 
plainly on the laws of life. Most thoroughly, in- 
deed, I dissociate myself from much that has been 
taught and believed on this subject. There is 
many a page in the writings of men whose names 
are inscribed, and deservedly inscribed, in letters 
of gold on the Church's roll of honour, which if I 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 159 

were to quote to you and were to say that this 
is Christianity, you might be tempted to become 
infidels on the spot. The God these men speak of, 
you might say, is to me the devil. When, for in- 
stance, Jonathan Edwards speaks thus: "You 
cannot stand an instant even before an infuriated 
tiger ; what then will you do when God rushes on 
you in His wrath V — and I have chosen a mild ex- 
ample of the kind of imagery our forefathers 
indulged in — we can only be thankful that we live 
in a day when God is better understood, and the 
face of Christianity is no longer defiled by such 
unconscious blasphemies. In the name of Chris- 
tianity I repudiate any idea of retribution except 
the working out of a moral necessity. "What 
maketh Heaven, that maketh Hell." And what 
makes both is this, "whatsoever a man soweth, 
that shall he also reap." That is the law of all 
worlds. As it has been said, ' ' Only that retribu- 
tion comes which must come ; and all the retribu- 
tion that must come comes !" And the essence of 
such retribution must be that whoever turns his 
back upon the life for which he is made, and which 
God offers him in Christ, becomes hateful to him- 
self. Against all other punishments he might lift 
a defiant front; but against a self which has be- 
come its own punishment there is no appeal, and 
from it no escape. 

That is our first truth : evil does not terminate 
with this life. Evil, impenitent and unvan- 
quished, bears its fullest harvest in the life be- 



160 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

yond. The next question necessarily is — will it 
ever terminate? Or is it eternal? Now I would 
remind you that when we speak of eternity we use 
a word the content of which we do not fully com- 
prehend. We can say that eternity is what 
transcends time; that time passes, while eternity 
is that which does not pass. But while the words 
convey a meaning, it is a meaning we cannot 
clearly grasp. We know that eternity cannot be 
measured by the clock; yet unawares we begin 
to measure it by the clock, even when we say that 
it cannot be so measured. And, indeed, if we are 
to think of eternity at all, we must think of it as 
we can, as beings whose whole experience is con- 
ditioned by time. Our question, therefore, is: 
Does evil stand on the same footing as good? Is 
it everlasting, fixed and final as good? Or may 
we hold to the larger hope, that in some far-off 
final consummation all evil will be overcome by 
good, that, as all existence began in unity, it will 
end in unity, higher and richer than that in which 
it began? I shall have no dogmatic answer to 
give to that question. The Bible has no dogmatic 
answer. As it leaves the origin of evil, so it 
leaves the end shrouded in mystery. All I can 
do is to show where the crux of the question lies, 
and to declare to you the attitude of mind in which 
alone I find satisfaction and rest for myself. 

Now the problem is commonly stated as that of 
eternal punishment. But that statement of it is 
to my mind superficial and misleading. The real 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 161 

problem is that of eternal evil. Is sin destined 
to remain an indelible blot on the universe which 
is God's creation, and on the souls He has made 
in His own image ? And when the question is so 
stated, our instinctive answer is that as a final 
result this is unthinkable. Did not God create all 
things out of His eternal, everflowing love? Did 
He not see the end from the beginning, and plan 
with infinite wisdom the creation to which His love 
gave birth? And is it conceivable that such a 
God should plan and make a universe in the midst 
of which there is to be eternally a great gulf fixed, 
in which evil, the thing He hates, which is con- 
trary to His nature and will, is to have an ever- 
lasting abode? And the souls He has made — has 
He not said "all souls are mine"? Did He not 
foreknow their character and their history; and 
can we believe that He, so foreknowing, created 
any to be the subjects of everlasting evil and 
misery? Did He not deliver up His own Son for 
us all, and promise that He should see of the 
travail of His soul and be satisfied? And can the 
Christ-heart ever be satisfied, can He who wept 
over impenitent Jerusalem ever feel His work 
completed so long as even one soul is left in the 
thraldom of sin and in a world of woe? When we 
ask such questions, it seems self-evident that but 
one conclusion is morally possible. These things 
cannot be; it is inconceivable that they should. 
For, mark this : eternal evil means the defeat of 
eternal goodness, love and light. It means the 



162 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

triumph of evil, its triumph in chains and dark- 
ness, but nevertheless its triumph. It means that 
God, being the Almighty, All-wise, All-loving 
Father we worship through Jesus Christ, has per- 
mitted evil to come into existence which is too 
strong and obdurate for all the remedial influ- 
ences He can bring to bear upon it, which is able 
to offer an eternal resistance to His will. I feel, 
and I am sure you feel, that on this side the diffi- 
culty is insuperable. 

And when we appeal to the New Testament, we 
find many utterances which point not to a drawn 
battle, but to a final and universal triumph of 
good. It is written that "of Him, and through 
Him, and unto Him are all things. " It is fore- 
told that in the name of Jesus every knee shall 
bow, of ' ' things in heaven and things on earth and 
things" under the earth "; that by Him God will 
"reconcile all things unto Himself, whether they 
be things on earth or things in heaven ;" and that 
in the "fulness of the dispensation of the times 
God will again sum up all things in Christ ,, ; and 
again that in the end "God will be all and in all," 
and I might quote other passages to a like effect. 
Now I am far from saying that these passages 
contain a doctrine of universal restoration and 
salvation ; but it cannot be denied that they point 
in that direction. That is what they naturally 
suggest; and if they, and the whole strain of 
thought in the New Testament which they repre- 
sent, stood alone, that is unquestionably the sense 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 163 

in which we should "understand them. And this is 
to be observed, that whenever the New Testament 
writers think of the final destiny of mankind from 
that point of view — from the side of God's pur- 
pose, plan and sovereignty — such is the tinge 
which their utterances naturally assume. 

Yes, if they stood alone, if there were no other 
point of view, there would be no uncertainty ex- 
cept as to the means by which final unity is to be 
brought about — if we had not to look at the prob- 
lem from the side of man, if we had not also to 
take into account what sin is, and what sin can 
make of man. Sin is as antagonistic to the nature 
and will of God first as last, and yet sin has come 
into being ; sin exists. Man is free ; and even the 
Sovereign God can only stand at the door of our 
nature and knock. He cannot force the door with- 
out destroying the mansion ; and when I ask my- 
self by what means men may be turned from evil 
hereafter who refuse to be turned from it here, 
I find no reply. Will sin be less mighty? Is it 
the nature of sin to run its course like a fever and 
by and by exhaust its virulence? Rather do we 
see, as I have said, that sin tends to beget more 
sin, becomes more deep-seated and ineradicable, 
so that in the natural course the bad man becomes 
steadily worse and the godless man more godless. 
There is nothing in the nature of sin that offers 
any hope. Nor can there be another and more 
powerful gospel hereafter. There is no stronger 
moral influence than that of love ; no vaster, purer 



164 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

love than that which is in Christ, no greater thing 
the love of Christ can do through endless ages 
than has been done in the sacrifice of Calvary. 
God has given His utmost and made His final ap- 
peal in His crucified Christ. There can be no 
better Gospel. It were high treason to Christ to 
permit the fancy. 

It may be said, however, that the retributions 
of the future will have a powerful influence in 
leading men to repentance. I admit the possibil- 
ity, but not the necessity. When men sin because 
they know not what they do, because they fail to 
realize that what they do to others is so far from 
what they would that others should do to them, 
retribution in the strictest sense of the word 
may wonderfully open their eyes. It might, one 
imagines and hopes, be applied to the German 
people and their rulers with a very wholesome 
effect. When there is anything of a right spirit 
within, suffering often is an instrument of mar- 
vellous efficacy for its awakening and develop- 
ment. But so far as I know anything of human 
life I deny that suffering is ever in itself a power 
to make any one morally better. It acts on men 
according to their nature. It makes them more 
sympathetic or more selfish, patient or impatient, 
according to what they are. It brings the godly 
man nearer to God, and it confirms the atheist in 
his atheism. There is no inherent efficacy in suf- 
fering to produce a moral change and turn a man's 
innermost self from evil to good. 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 165 

And finally I ask, will the grace of God, the 
power of good to overcome evil, the power of 
God's loving Holy Spirit, be stronger hereafter 
than here? That cannot be. Men speak of a 
1 ' second chance. ' ' Will there be a second chance ? 
Yes, and a third chance, and a thousand chances. 
Of that I am sure as that I stand here ; and I do 
not comprehend how any one who believes in the 
God of Christianity can doubt that, if hereafter 
any soul should yield and repent, then even in the 
outer darkness he will see the light of God's Face, 
will find a knocker left for him on the door of 
mercy. It is of the essence of the Christian Gos- 
pel that the one and only condition of forgiveness 
is repentance. That condition is universal. It 
does not lapse with time. It cannot hold good in 
one world and not in another. God does not 
change His nature; and Eternal Fatherhood can 
never cast out the penitent. The question is not 
as to the opportunity of repentance either now or 
hereafter, but only as to its possibility. And what 
reason is there to exclude that possibility here- 
after? Many depart this life regarding whom it 
cannot be said that they have reached any fixity 
of character for good or evil. Who can tell, in- 
deed, when or how fixity of character for evil is 
reached? The very pith of our Gospel message 
is that we are not to regard it as reached by any 
one in this life. It bids us despair of no man, but 
hopefully call all to repentance: for " while the 
lamp holds on to burn, the greatest sinner may 



166 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

return.' ' And when does the lamp of life cease to 
burn? If to-night on my way home I were to be 
run over by an automobile and killed, surely the 
lamp of my life would not be extinguished. The 
"lamp" is not the fleeting breath, but the soul, 
the conscious moral personality. And there is 
no reason in the nature of the soul why the fact 
of physical death should of itself suddenly pro- 
duce an irredeemable fixity of character, and seal 
moral destiny for ever. And if there is no reason 
in the nature of the soul, be assured, brethren, 
that there is no reason in the nature of God. If 
the prodigal's famine of happiness does not come 
to him here but hereafter, and if then he comes 
to himself, our whole Christian faith bids us be 
sure that he will find the Father 's embrace around 
him. 

Yet this does not carry us all the way to a final 
unity. If physical death does not fix as little 
does it unfix character. The constant tendency, 
as we everywhere see, is toward fixity; and if 
there are those who can resist God to the last in 
this life, what reason is there to believe that in 
another life, where they reap in greater fixity of 
character the fruit of their sowing here, they will 
not be capable of resisting Him for ever? I must 
confess that on this side also we are met by a 
solid wall through which no issue into a final unity 
is visible. And, further, it is on this side of the 
matter that the Gospel throws the full weight of 
its testimony and of its pleadings and warnings. 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 167 

It speaks of irremediable loss, of a great gulf 
fixed, of a "too late," of an accepted time and a 
day of salvation which is now, of a Spirit sent to 
convict the world of sin, of righteousness and of 
judgment, whose word is only of a "to-day" in 
which He calls men not to harden their hearts. If 
on the one hand the New Testament speaks some- 
times of a universal Kingdom of God and a com- 
plete triumph of reconciling love, not once, on the 
other hand, does it shed any ray of light upon the 
future of the impenitent sinner. It sets the pres- 
ent before us as the crisis of our fate, and gives an 
"aspect of finality to the spiritual choices of this 
life." 

To sum up, the question of eternal evil raises in 
its acutest form, and carries to its last issue, the 
insoluble antimony of the sovereignty of God and 
the free will of man. All comes back to this. 
The nerve of the problem is here. On the one 
hand the Scriptures reveal to us a God whose lov- 
ing purpose is almighty and sovereign, who can 
open the heart that seems trebly locked and barred 
against good, who can "persuade and enable" 
the most sinful to turn unto Him; and our own 
faith and experience affirm the truth of this. On 
the other hand, scripture and experience assure us 
equally of our own freedom, of a boundless power 
of choosing evil rather than good. And if the 
Bible does not reconcile, or attempt to reconcile, 
these great truths, you and I cannot. 

For myself I refrain from dogmatism. I can- 



168 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

not do otherwise. I dare as little deny that the 
grace of God will at last triumph over all evil as 
I dare affirm that the will of man may not offer 
to it an endless resistance. To pronounce con- 
fidently upon what shall be throughout the eter- 
nities, the ages of ages of God's unending life, 
during which also the soul of man is to exist — 
well, I marvel at those who imagine themselves 
able to do that. 

I have set before you the difficulties of the 
problem, not the solution. But for myself I find 
one refuge in all these perplexities; and to it I 
would direct you also. That refuge is Christ. 
"He shall see of the travail of His soul and be 
satisfied.' ' For me that is enough; it is every- 
thing. He will be satisfied. He who is the 
Creator and Eedeemer of men, who loved men 
unto the death, who more than watchers long for 
the morning longs for the multitudes of earth to 
come unto Him, who is everlasting, changeless 
Love — He will be satisfied in the ultimate issue 
of His work of creation and salvation. I cannot 
say, I cannot see, anything more than that ; I do 
not want to say or to see more than that. He will 
be satisfied. In this I can entirely rest. Here I 
can lay down the burden of all my perplexities. 
He will be satisfied, when or how we know not; 
but that He will be satisfied makes it infinitely 
certain that the furthest future can disclose 
nothing that will not display, beyond all we can 



IS EVIL ETERNAL? 169 

ask or think, the perfect love and righteousness, 
power and wisdom, of the Everlasting God. 

But the present now is ours. Duty knows no 
future. Wisdom finds too much to regret in what 
is already past, and knows no salvation except 
that of the irrecoverable to-day, too precious to be 
spent in vain. 



XI: ETERNAL LIFE 



XI 

Eteknal Life 

' ' And the witness is thus, that God gave unto us eternal life, and 
this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; he 
that hath not the Son of God hath not the life." — 1 John v.ll, 12. 

Life ! Eternal life ! — God has given us eternal 
life and this life is in His Son — this is the message 
of the Christian Gospel, the greatest, gladdest of 
all messages because eternal life is the greatest, 
gladdest and best of all things. But what is 
eternal life? Throughout the course of sermons 
which this evening I bring to a close, I have been 
speaking of eternal life as the great Hope set be- 
fore us ; but though I have been speaking of it as 
perfected hereafter, I have endeavoured to keep 
steadily in view the continuity of the life that now 
is with that which is to come, and to exhibit them, 
not as two lives, but as one life in its two stages of 
sowing and reaping, growth and consummation. 
But I desire to make that specifically my subject 
this evening; and therefore I have taken my text 
from St. John. It was given to St. John to see, 
as no one before him had seen quite so clearly, 
that there is only one true life for man, here or 
hereafter, on the earth or in the sun. One of his 

173 



174 THE HOPE OF OUE CALLING 

immense gifts to the Church and to mankind is his 
insight into the trath that eternal life is not a 
life hereafter, not a future and distant felicity, not 
a crown to be received at the end, but a present 
reality, an immediate possession. It is not pri- 
marily a length of life, but a kind of life, the high- 
est quality of life and, as I have said, the greatest, 
gladdest and best of all things. Often, indeed St. 
John speaks of it simply as ' ' the life, ' ' as if there 
were no other life to be mentioned beside it, or 
worthy of the name. 

For life is not measured by the clock, not even 
the physical life. If a man had just physical 
vitality enough to exist, to keep decomposition at 
bay and hold body and soul together, though he 
should prolong such an existence through many 
years, he would know less of what physical life is 
than a healthy child in the space of one joyous 
summer-day. And there is a corresponding dif- 
ference in the life of mind and spirit. The sage 
has a larger life than the clown; the poet is more 
alive than the man whose energies flow out merely 
that money may flow in; the man who loves his 
fellowmen and lives to serve them is really more 
alive than the man whose endeavour is to make 
others serve him ; the man who strives to be wise 
and good than the man who seeks only to be so 
reputed. And eternal life is the highest grade of 
life, the life that has in it all the sovereign ele- 
ments — knowledge, love, joy, power — for which 
we are made, life that is eternal and inexhaustible 



ETERNAL LIFE 175 

in its meaning and value. After all, brethren, 
that is the one grand argument for immortality — 
a life here that not only has meaning for three 
score years and ten, but is worth living for ever 
and ever, that demands the completions of fu- 
turity. It is the eternal life in us now that reaches 
out to the eternal life to come. 

Let us then, in the first place, grasp this thought 
about eternal life, that primarily it has nothing to 
do with present or future, or with length of dura- 
tion. You cannot raise the level or change the 
character of any kind of existence by merely pro- 
longing it. The life of a horse or a dog, though 
it were spun out for centuries, would never be- 
come the life of a man. And no more could the 
life of a worldly man, though it were continued 
without end, become eternal life. No, though he 
should be clothed in purple and fine linen and fare 
sumptuously every day for ever and ever, such 
existence would come never a whit nearer to being 
what the New Testament calls eternal life. 

In the next place, we ask, "What is this eternal 
life! What is its definition? How shall we de- 
scribe this life which is eternal in its meaning and 
value? There is only one adequate description of 
it — deeper than all philosophic thought, which yet 
a child may understand. Eternal life is the life 
of Jesus Christ. Turn to the second verse in the 
first chapter of this Epistle and read these words : 
"And the life was manifested, and we have seen 
it, even the eternal life which was with the Father 



176 THE HOPE OP OUR CALLING 

and was manifested unto us." There is its defi- 
nition. The life which is eternal, the greatest, 
gladdest, divinest of all things, is the kind of life 
which we see in Jesus Christ. Everything He 
was and did possessed eternal meaning and value. 
Every word of grace and truth He spoke, every 
deed of holy love He did, when He touched the 
leper, when He fed the hungry, when he opened 
His heart to the sinful and weary with all their 
sins and cares, when He rejoiced in spirit and 
when He wept, when in obedience to the Father's 
will He took up His cross daily and when He gave 
Himself in love for the life of the world, — ev- 
ery step was an unfolding of the eternal life. 
Measured by years Christ's life was short. You 
can easily count its days and hours ; a school-child 
could soon tell you how many minutes there were 
between Bethlehem and Calvary. But life is not 
measured by the calendar. Who would exchange 
an hour of glorious, soul-filling human life for all 
the centuries of an earth-worm's existence? And 
who would not rather live one day of Christ's 
life than all the long years of a Methuselah? 
Measured by circumstances Christ's life was a 
poor life, a small life. A cottage home, a country 
village, a carpenter's bench, a year or two of itin- 
erant preaching, a shameful death, — these were its 
boundaries of circumstance. But who would not 
rather have done one of Christ's deeds than pos- 
sess the gold of all the millionaires? What can 
express the worth of one hour of that life? The 



ETERNAL LIFE 177 

sea may be fathomed, the earth may be weighed 
and measured; but what mathematics can calcu- 
late the magnitude of the holiness of Christ; the 
faith of Christ ; the sorrow of Christ ; the peace of 
Christ. In what balance can you weigh the life of 
Christ or by what measure its length and breadth 
and height? "It cannot be gotten for gold, 
neither shall silver be weighed for the price there- 
of.' ' It is the life eternal; of eternal value, yester- 
day and to-day and for ever the supreme good, 
measureless, divine. 

We may regard it for a moment from another 
point of view. Can we characterize this life which 
is in Christ? Can we tell what it is in a single 
word? I think so. It is the life of goodness, 
just of perfect goodness. " "Us only noble to be 
good," Tennyson says. The poet might have 
gone further and said not only "noble" but 
"divine." For goodness is nothing else than the 
Divine nature itself, the Spirit of God, incarnate 
and expressed in man. And Jesus Christ is ( ( God 
lived by man." His life is the life of God cast 
in the mould of our humanity, the life of absolute 
goodness. And the whole aim of Christianity is 
to make good men. Christianity stands or falls 
by its power to make men good ; sober — good, that 
is, in relation to themselves ; righteous — good, that 
is, in relation to their fellows ; godly — good in re- 
lation to God. We sometimes speak as if Chris- 
tians were some highly specialized sort of good 
men, as if the Christian character were a particU" 



17S THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

lar type of goodness. No. There is only one 
kind of real goodness, the goodness we see in 
Jesus Christ ; and there is only one kind of really 
good men, those who are like Christ, who have in 
them the same spirit He had. 

And so we are led inevitably to the further 
truth, that Christ is the touchstone of destiny for 
all man. "He that hath the Son," the Son of 
God, Jesus Christ, "hath life, and he that hath 
not the Son of God hath not life. ' y This follows 
because we have not that life in ourselves— that 
surely we all know — and because, not having that 
life in ourselves, neither can we produce it in our- 
selves. "Self-knowledge, self -reverence, self-con- 
trol,' ' says Tennyson again, "these three lead 
life to sovereign power.' ' But he is wrong. 
That is the one thing self-knowledge, self-rev- 
erence and self-control cannot do — lead life 
to sovereign power. Self cannot raise self, any 
more than one up to the shoulders in a morass 
can extricate himself by the writhings and con- 
tortions of his own muscles. Archimedes used to 
say that he could move the earth, if only he had 
a lever long enough and a place outside the earth 
to stand upon. In morals the same impractica- 
bility is the dead wall which all attempts at mere 
self-improvement are brought up against. You 
cannot yourself make yourself really other than 
you are. If you are to lift yourself to a higher 
plane of life, a helping hand must be stretched out 
to you. You can be elevated only from above. 



ETERNAL LIFE 179 

He that hath the Son hath life. Not self, hut 
Christ — not self-knowledge, self-reverence, self- 
control, hut Christ-knowledge, Christ-reverence, 
Christ-control — these lead life to sovereign power. 
You cannot get goodness except from goodness. 
You cannot get the Divine Spirit except from the 
Divine Man. He that hath the Son hath life, and 
he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. 
Get possession of Christ, and your soul shall live, 
live the eternal life. 

But you may ask what it is to have Christ, 
how such a connection with Christ is to be formed. 
For the construction of a railway — in India I think 
it was — a bridge was to be thrown across a mighty 
ravine, through which there flowed, far beneath, 
a deep and turbulent river. From shore to shore 
a strong iron bridge was to be hung aloft in the 
air. But how was it to be commenced? They 
first shot an arrow from one side to the other, 
and it carried across the gulf a tiny thread. The 
thread then drew a piece of twine; the twine a 
small rope; the rope a cable; and in good time 
came the great iron chains and the huge iron 
girders, and all else that was needed to make a 
permanent way. Something like that is our spir- 
itual problem. Across that chasm which sepa- 
rates us from Christ and the life of perfect good- 
ness we cannot at once construct the final and 
permanent way. But can we shoot some arrow of 
the soul across it? Some arrow of faith, of love, 
of desire? You may name it as you will, to be- 



180 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

lieve on Christ, to love Christ, to desire Christ — 
all these lie very close together in the outgoing of 
the soul. And that this is what is required of us 
is the great commonplace of the Gospel. It is so 
very commonplace. If I were to give out as my 
text some evening, "Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and thou shalt be saved," you would put on 
an air of resignation and prepare yourselves to 
listen to something very threadbare. Yet if one 
only thinks about it, how is this commonplace of 
the Gospel all lit up with wonder ! Think how God 
meets us where we are able to meet Him, not de- 
manding goodness of us, but enquiring only 
whether we have any heart for goodness, whether 
we believe in goodness as the "principal thing" 
and love it and desire it. Think further that this 
is the way of truth as well as of mercy. There is 
nothing fictitious or unreal about this way of sal- 
vation by faith. You and I are not just what we 
are; in deeper truth we are what we vitally be- 
lieve in. The mark at which we shoot the arrows 
of the soul is the thing we are growing towards. 
If you believe in money as the finest thing in the 
world, that determines at once the kind of man 
you are going to be; if you believe in having a 
good time, you will grow to be a different kind of 
man ; if in goodness, an altogether different kind 
of man from either. "What you really believe in, 
what you surrender yourself to, is the index to 
what is deepest in you, the clue to all your poten- 
tialities. And that is what makes Christ the 



ETERNAL LIFE 181 

Judge of men, the supreme test, the touchstone of 
destiny. That is why God's final question is, Do 
you believe in Christ? Do you believe in the 
Christ-life? Do you above all things desire the 
life that is in Him? 

It is possible to make this way of salvation by 
believing a very artificial thing. It is so if we 
think of it as a kind of arrangement or transac- 
tion, a kind of makeshift for real goodness. And, 
no doubt, theologians have sometimes explained 
it in that way, and Christian people sometimes 
think about it in that way. But they do not in 
their hearts feel it in that way. What is Chris- 
tian faith — the faith that justifies, as St. Paul 
would say, or, as St. John would say, the faith by 
which we "have" Christ and get his life as our 
own? It is in the great simple words of Wesley's 
hymn just this — 

"Thou, O Christ, art all I want, 
More than all in Thee I find." 

That is God's test for you and me, the test of 
present character and future destiny. If you in 
your inmost soul believe in Jesus Christ, if your 
soul loves and desires Him, it is because the Eter- 
nal Life is stirring in you. It has been so ordered 
that there is nothing else in Christ to attract su- 
premely. There is nothing to fascinate the carnal 
mind, no pomp of kingliness, pride of conquest or 
splendour of wealth. To the Jew, to the wor- 
shipper of wealth and power and social distinct 



182 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

tion, the Cross is ever a stumbling-block. If we 
go to Him in the interests of intellect and culture, 
or logic and eloquence, philosophy and artistic 
elegance, we shall find in Him the greatest of 
thinkers, the most masterly of reasoners and ex- 
quisite of teachers ; but His true greatness lies in 
another sphere. To the Greek the Cross is fool- 
ishness. But when we go to Christ with a soul 
hungering and thirsting for righteousness, seeking 
after the life that is life indeed, His glory begins 
to dawn. And when we are awake to the reality 
of sin and the imperious necessity of redemption; 
when we feel the need of an infinite love to love 
us in our sin and love us out of it, a love that will 
have boundless patience with us and is capable of 
infinite self-sacrifice on our behalf, then Christ 
is transfigured before us. To the self-sufficient 
there is little beauty in Him that they should de- 
sire Him ; but to the humble heart with its burdens 
and strivings, its fears and hopes and aspirations, 
His face shines as the sun and His raiment is 
white as light. 

"Thee, O Christ, art aU I want." 

That is God's test for you and me, the test of ab- 
solute truth, as well as of mercy. And it is a 
present test. We respond to it now ; we cannot do 
otherwise. The day of destiny is now; and the 
touchstone of destiny is here. Judgment does 
not wait for any dramatic grand finale. You and 



ETERNAL LIFE 183 

I are secretly, and silently taking our places. We 
are now standing on the right hand or the left of 
the Judge. He that hath the Son hath life ; and 
he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. It 
will be seen hereafter where we stand; but now, 
not then, is the crisis ; now, not then, is the testing 
hour. How do we respond to God's test? You 
young people, have you found the magnet of your 
lives in God's Son? Or are you so occupied with 
secularities, things innocent in themselves, it may 
be, or even praise-worthy, that you have no heart 
for the life eternal? It may be so. Thousands 
about us are spiritually dead. They have with- 
ered from the top; so far as their highest being 
is concerned they walk the streets in their shrouds. 
And you too may wrong your highest possibilities 
until the eyes of the heart are darkened, until 
the power of belief in eternal things is decayed 
and the supreme faculties of the soul, made for 
God and goodness, are paralysed, perhaps beyond 
recovery. There is only one salvation from this 
fate: "I when I am lifted up, will draw all men 
unto me!" He is the true magnet of your life, 
let Him draw you. Bring yourself within the 
range of His influence ; think of Him ; give heed to 
Him; be in earnest and deal sincerely with Him 
and with yourself, until you say, "Thou, Christ, 
art all I want. ' ' By and by you will add, ' i More 
than all in Thee I find." He is all you want, if 
you but know it, all for this life and all for that 
which is to come. 



184 THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING 

Some years ago, before I left Scotland, there 
was a dreadful accident in a coal-mine, by which 
a large number of miners were imprisoned in its 
depths. The ordinary ways of entrance to the 
mine were so blocked that weeks must have 
elapsed before they could be cleared. But a plan 
was found. A bore was driven vertically through 
the rock to where the entombed miners were 
known to be; and through the narrow aperture 
air, food and light were let down to the starving 
and half-suffocated men, who then, themselves re- 
freshed, carried the gifts of life to their fellows 
who were still more deeply buried in the recesses 
of the mine. Afterwards, a wider shaft was 
blasted out, through which the men themselves 
were drawn up into the world of light and safety, 
beheld the faces of their rescuers and friends, and 
were restored to the homes they had feared never 
to see again. It is an illustration, however rude 
and imperfect, of the communication Christ has 
opened between Earth and Heaven. He has sunk 
the bore, as it were ; He has pierced the obstruc- 
tion. He has opened the way ; not yet the way by 
which we may finally rise to the life eternal, but 
the way by which it may descend to us. We see 
not yet His face; but He speaks to us words of 
immortal hope. He lets in some beam of the 
Eternal Day upon our lives, some breath of the 
Divine atmosphere. He sends down to us the 
Living Bread of which if a man eat he shall never 
die. Let us eat of that bread, and live by that 



ETERNAL LIFE 185 

light, and hand on these means of life to others 
who are within our reach. Then by and by He 
will open to us that wider exit through which we 
shall be delivered at last from all darkness and 
dangers, and shall see our Saviour face to face, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



